Looseleaf Binders and Such
by Red Molly
Summary: "She was going to have to put up a 'no trespassing' sign; she could tell right now."  Things you do in high-school come back to haunt you, even if you've traveled far and wide of Harlan.  Raylan/OC/Boyd  COMPLETE
1. No Trespassing

A/N: I don't own it. I am, however, an old school redneck. I am not from the Kentucky coal country, but I live very close to coal country in West Virginia. Any misrepresentation is my own fault. This is graphic, but so is life in that part of the world.

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><p>She was half awake, slurping coffee when she heard the .300 go off in the lower pasture. Kate began to cuss long and loud, which woke the dog. Monte raised his little blue head and looked guilty up at his mistress as she stomped down the hall to the gun safe.<p>

"Too EARLY. Can't even finish th' COFFEE."

Cuss. Swear. Snarl. Guilty looks from the blue heeler pup. Kate Bellamy stomped off the front porch, let the screen door slam behind her and strode down the overgrown ruts that led to the lower end of her property. Monte yelped as the door slapped his nose. The little 20 gauge shotgun set easy in her hands. The dirt road ran a straight hundred yards down the holler from the house, keeping to the side of the hill instead of setting dead on top of it. The road itself was around eighty years old, worn smooth like the rocks down at the river, and grown over heavy with oak and shagbark hickory.

About fifty yards from the low-pasture gate, Kate paused and thumbed three shells into the little pump shotgun. She took stock. There was a battered Ford F-150 backed up to the gate, two tone blue. Somewhere around a '75. She couldn't see the license plate but there was an "I Support the NRA" sticker on the passenger-side window. She stepped up the bank on the right side of the road and eased across the barb-wire fence into the pasture.

She could hear them. They were young. They couldn't be more than fifteen.

"Aw shit, now what are we gonna do?"

"Well, I supposed we could cut the fence…" trailed off the taller of the two.

Kate took her time and walked up on them slow. The deer they'd shot was still alive, hung in the fence and bleating. The distress call of the American White-tailed Deer is a pitiful thing, and finally, after listening to them bicker back and forth, Kate sighed, walked between the stunned boys, and shoved her pocked knife blade through into the brain pan. The animal twitched once and went still. Kate turned toward the boys, angry, disgust rippling.

"You start," she wiped the blade of the pocket knife on her jeans, "by not poaching deer off of other people's property. And THEN," she approached the taller of the two, angling the shotgun in front of her, "you don't get CAUGHT." She poked him in the chest. "And when you hang one in the fence, you pop it in the back of the head with a HAMMER. Or do it with a pocketknife like I just did."

The boys were frozen, horrified.

"And THEN," she hissed, turning to the stocky one, "if you want to live to see breakfast, you get yourself and your fool of a friend back in that truck parked across my culvert and you leave out of here as fast as is sensible."

She watched them go, ramrod straight in the seats of the cab as the truck bounced. She was fairly sure the taller one had peed his pants and that neither of them would be able to look her in the eye two weeks later when the school term started and she picked up teaching Jimmy Abernathy's English courses down at Harlan.

Hell of a way to start the school year. She sighed quietly and propped the shotgun up on a fencepost. Slowly, she unwrapped the carcass from the barbed wire and rolled the dead animal down into the holler. The coyotes and the buzzards would have it clean in a couple of weeks.

She was going to have to put up a 'no trespassing' sign, she could tell right now.


	2. Breakfast

She scraped herself together enough between the lower pasture and the house to decide that she wasn't going to put forth the effort to make breakfast. Some lucky gal down at the diner was going to do that. So she apologized to the puppy, brushed her hair, and drug into town wearing a clean shirt and dirty blue jeans.

Kate really didn't have any reason to think a whole lot of how she looked until she was halfway though her pancakes and Winona Givens walked in. And then she flinched. The last time she'd seen Wi, the two of them could have fit in the same pea pod but now….Kate almost didn't want to say anything for fear of looking like a…._like a WHAT, Kate? _So she spoke.

"Wi? Winona is that you?"

The exquisite French roll turned around and Wi's eyes lit like a Christmas tree. "Katie?" She was squealing, and by the time the old acquaintance was renewed, Kate was very glad she'd decided she wasn't all that self conscious.

Halfway through the second cup of coffee, it surprised Kate. "You're not a Givens, then?"

"Nope. No, I'm a Hawkins now." Winona smiled the smile she used when she was hiding something. It was satisfied and quiet and too smug to be the real Wi.

Kate paused, and then sat straight up. "Not Gary…."

Wi started to laugh and nodded, half embarrassed.

"MY Gary! The one that would have licked my shoes the entire four years of high school and then got drunk the night he took me to senior prom! THAT Gary Hawkins?"

"Yes yes. _That _one."

"But Winona, why? Of all the good men in Harlan County, why Gary?"

"Well, after Raylan and I split he just….He was peace, you know?"

Kate leaned back in her checkered shirt and regarded her friend. She remembered the idiocy of Gary Hawkins The Football Player, and then the equal idiocy of Raylan Givens The Moonshiner's Son. She compared the two, and somewhere in the back of her mind, Gary bringing peace into Winona's life made sense. Not a whole lot, but it leaned in that direction.

"Well….," Kate raised her coffee cup and smiled. "Here's to ya, Wi."

Winona laughed and clinked her own coffee mug with Kate's. "Honey, I'm gonna be late for work. I need to ruuun."

Kate rose with her and gave her a hug. "Come out to the house sometime. I know you didn't tell me _everything _and I'm behind on the county gossip."

Winona laughed a little loud. "Well….."

"I'm at the old Peabody place."

"What?" Wi's eyebrows shot up.

"Yeah, I bought it free and clear before I left for Denver in '98, with the condition that the Peabody's had hunting rights until such time as I moved back. So I'm up in Pa's old house. Spent the better part of the summer fixing it up and it's starting to come along now." She smiled quiet.

"You've been up there all summer and I didn't know it?" Wi reached her long fingers over and wrapped them around Kate's neck, mock strangling the woman. "Shame on you!"

"Don't kill me now, it'll make you late for work!"

Winona hugged her again and strolled out the door.

Kate paid for breakfast, both their coffees (Wi had forgotten to do anything about hers, but that stood to reason…she always was kinda scatterbrained) and took the old Scottsdale Chevy back up the mountain. She really needed to get some new clothes before school started. She might just have to call Winona and schedule a day in Lexington.

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Winona pulled an eyelid down, looking into the motel mirror as she smeared on the eyeliner.

"You are not going to be-_lieve _who I ran into today, Raylan."

Givens stuck his head around the bathroom door, hair lank and wet and not a stitch on his person. "Who might that be?"

"Katie Bellamy."

Raylan smiled slow and chuckled. "What…she in for a visit?"

"No, she bought the old Peabody place and she's moved back. She's…she's teaching, I guess."

"Who'd'a figured. I kinda thought when she went out to Denver to grad school that we wouldn't ever see her again."

Raylan strolled out of the bathroom and pulled a pair of clean jeans from the hanger. He had set with Katie at the train station while she waited for her ride to Chicago and to school. Academic scholarships got people out of Harlan just like football scholarships did, and when Katie got accepted out at Denver, she jumped on that band wagon and pushed it til the axles broke out from under her. People paid their respects to her like she was dead already, and so when the time come for her to leave, the goodbyes were all said and that left Kate alone. Down at the train station. The only person on the bench outside.

He wouldn't have been down there except he was sparkin' one of the girls that worked there, and her shift was just about up. So he sat with Katie, hugged her like they were little again, and carried her things to the doorway of the train.

"Gonna miss you, Raylan Givens."

"Gonna miss you, Kate Bellamy."

"Yeah, well….." And then the train was gone, and Kate took leave of Harlan just as she had entered it.

So Kentucky had called her home.


	3. Raylan

A/N: Don't own Justified and I don't own Jamey Johnson either. There's just something about the entire 'That Lonesome Song' album that speaks to me. Various songs from it will be making appearances.

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"That mornin' sun made its way through the windshield of my Chevrolet, whiskey eyed, with ash tray breath on a chert-rock gravel road….."

Raylan sat at the head of Kate's driveway on the hood of his car and listened to Harlan's Prodigal Daughter sing. She was clear up in the field above the house dragging up brush and he could still hear her down below. Pipes. Kate had always had them. That and the acoustics back here at the end of this holler were pretty awesome.

She and Winona had made a run to Lexington last week, and the rest of the story—Raylan was guessing on both sides—had come out. Kate was teaching, certainly. She was planning on putting horses on the place at some point. Nothing fascinating had happened out west that Winona cared to mention, so because Raylan was a snoop by nature, he had Tim run a check on her. Nada.

Which was why he was setting just behind the cattle guard at the bottom of Kate's Hill, waiting for her to go to the house.

"And it's saaaaad, and it's looooong, and can't nobody sing along…..It's a southbound train, a whistle in the wind….." Suddenly she stopped and he watched her straighten up. That was another thing Kate had always done well. She had a back like a ramrod, and despite the fact that she didn't break five foot five, she still managed to look like an exclamation point when something had her attention.

She let go a steamboat whistle, swept her arm inward, and started down the hill. The puppy scampered after her.

Raylan did as he was bidden and started the car, rolling it up the long dirt road and parking in what amounted to the barnyard. In order to get to Kate's house, you had to walk up a flight of sandstone steps laid in the hill years and years ago. They were smooth with age, like the dirt road, and the railing was crumbly-rotten.

Kate met him at the porch, a wry smile on her face, a pair of ripped leather gloves in her hand.

"You couldn't have come up with Wi last Friday?"

"Figured….might be a little awkward."

"It could have been," Kate assented, letting a slow nod speak what she needed it to. The lawman doffed his hat and Miss Bellamy turned a welcoming shoulder toward the back door. "Mind that top step there. I about busted my derriere a couple of days ago bringing in the groceries."

The back room floor needed sweeping. There were dishes in the sink, but not as many as he had expected. The kitchen table had a centerpiece of books, pens, three looseleaf binders, and notepads. Everything from 'The Count of Monte Cristo" to "Atlas Shrugged" to the latest James Cameron.

"How many of these is overdue?" he asked, chuckling.

Kate paused at the coffee maker, turned, and rifled through the pile. "The Cameron book. I have a couple of things I have to take down to the school today anyhow. How come? Overdue library books a federal offense these days?"

Raylan chuckled and shook his head.

"Would you set down? You're makin' me twitchy."

Not that she needed HIS help to be twitchy…..He took the chair closest to the door, angling it back so he could stretch out his long legs on the cracked linoleum.

"You still take it like a communist?"

He placed his hat upside down on the table and gave her The Eye. She raised a rueful brow of her own and dropped two heaping spoonfuls of sugar and a slug of powdered creamer into the cup before she placed it on the table. She poured herself a mug and then sat down across from him.

There was a moment where he was almost lost for words, and then he remembered how she worked.

"Kate are you talking to Boyd?"

She shook her head and then rested it on the rim of the coffee cup. "Last I heard he was tied up with his brother's wife, was he not?"

Something like that, the Marshall thought. "I'm not here as a Marshall. I'm here as a friend, 'kay?"

"No." Kate leaned back in her chair tiredly and shook her head at him. The look on her face aged her, aged her bad. "What. What did you think, Raylan? That I was going to come back to it all like a dog to its vomit?" She pushed up her left sleeve and let the silvered scar there catch the light. "You honestly think that I would better myself the way I have to come home and start cooking methamphetamine. Again. After this?"

Raylan remembered. The scar only _started _on her left arm. It ran across the entirety of her left side, crawling up like a slick mold up her ribs, across the left side of her chest, and then hooking over her shoulder. There had been a lot of Kate-in-the-Hospital after that. Skin grafts. Quite a bit of pain, from what he understood. He'd only gone to see her once, and she'd cussed him and then cried when he hugged her.

She'd cashed in on her scholarship after that. Life as a Crowder's woman had lost its appeal.

The puppy broke his reverie, pushing his blocky little head up under Raylan's hand asking to be petted. The marshall half smiled and swallowed hard on the coffee.

"I'm just sayin', is all." He turned his attention to the blue heeler but kept talking. "Boyd's…..he's cut some interesting cloth these past few months."

"I would not expect anything less of him. Would you?" Kate spoke from behind the coffee mug she was holding to her forehead. Raylan looked up from the dog and shook his head.

"No, not really." A half smile crossed the Kentuckian's face and Kate smiled back at him. She snorted suddenly with laughter.

"What?"

"Next time you see Boyd, say something about the Barton's Ridge school house, just in passing."

Raylan cocked a brow. "What about it?"

"Just do it. You'll get a laugh out of it."

Raylan filed that away and made a mental note to ask around and find out if anything suspicious-like had happened out on Barton's Ridge in the last two decades.

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Kate walked him out to the car, and he mentioned Ma Bennett and her sons.

"Coover," Kate said fondly. "Pot-head."

"There's that grasp of the obvious," Raylan drawled, and she punched him lightly on the shoulder. They had a mutual agreement about Dicky Bennett. Givens did the loathing and Kate did the laughing. Doyle they had done without and, as Kate pointed out, she would CONTINUE to do without. Lord Willing and the Creek Don't Rise.

Raylan pulled out with a parting shot. "Just be careful, okay?"

"You're three months younger than I am. Quit fussin' like an older brother."

Raylan shook his head and backed the car down past the cattleguard, k-turned it, and drove back to his motel. He neglected to say anything about the half rotten deer he'd been smellin' the entire time he'd been sitting there listening to Kate sing. He knew it wasn't HER doing. If she'd'a killed the thing, it would have been in the freezer.

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A/N II: So clarification might be in order. I've had the name Kate Bellamy floating around in my head for a long time, and one evening watching Justified on Hulu (blessed artifice that it is :D) the character that you're watching develop came to me. I'll let you discover for yourself who she is, but you're going to be seeing her through a lot of different eyes as I write this. There IS a plot. On my honor as a horsewoman there IS. You're just gonna have to bear with me. Also….REVIEWS WOULD BE AWESOME!


	4. Dickey

Dickey Bennett felt MARVELOUS. He wasn't high—at least not yet and maybe that would be a good idea for later—but he was buzzing like the wound-tight critter he was and was having entirely too much fun throwing pebbles at Doyle's crawler to let the overcast summer sky dampen his mood. Ah September in Kentucky. Nothing amazing, but if you liked it you liked it, and Dickey did.

He was splayed out on a bench on Main Street, and every time the handful of pebbles ran low, he leaned back and dug another out of the planter behind him. Un_limited_ munitions. _Yeah. _He was hitting accurately, taking a chip of paint with each hit, and spelling his name out in swooping, pain-staking detail. He might not have played ball in years, but he damn sure knew how to make something move through the air.

He was halfway through the curly-cue at the top of the 'c' when he realized that there was someone standing to his left, watching. He looked up from under the old ball cap and stopped still for all of five seconds.

Kate? "Katie?"

"Whatcha celebrating, Dickey?" She had three bags of groceries in her right hand and the purse straps wrapped around her left arm.

"Oh….oh. Just this fine September day." He went spread eagle on the bench and took a long drag on the wind, looked up grinning.

Kate sat her groceries on the sidewalk and plopped down next to him on the bench. Dickey was an ass. There was no denying it. Neither was he very intelligent, but still. He never failed to make her laugh, and she liked him for that. The middle Bennett boy dropped an arm around her shoulder.

"How are you, prodigal? I haven't seen you since…."

"'95, I think, Dickey."

"Well what goes on, girl? I mean, are you hear just to flip us all off and leave, or are you…"

"Teaching, ya fool. And I've got the Peabody place."

Dickey leaned back and studied the woman at his side. "Teaching English?"

"Mmm-hmm. Good guess. What are you doing, buster brown?"  
>"Oh I'm…making my way….just kinda," he floated his long fingers out in front of<p>

himself. "makin' my way, you know."

Kate knew exactly what he was talking about. "Not all of us have the luxury of working with our mamas, you know," she drawled. "What's Mags up to these days?"

"She's running the store, managing the real estate and all that…"

"Mags is in real estate?"

"My mama is in _everything,"_ Dickey said with conviction. "She's a _genius._"

Kate wouldn't exactly call her that, but Maw Bennett was certainly somewhere out in that direction. Screw it. She leaned back on Dickey's shoulder and took in the day for another five minutes or so without either one of them talking. This wasn't one of those days when she cared to pay attention to what Harlan thought. And if they wanted to fuss about the new English teacher laying all over Dickey Bennett on a Main Street park bench that was their prerogative.

"It's a good day, Kate."

"Yes, Dickey. Yes it is."

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"Mama are we interested in the Peabody place?" Before Mags could ask him why, he filled his mouth with a chunk of homemade bread and watched her face, cheeks bulging like a chipmunk.

The woman set solidly on her feet and thought. "It's a possibility. Just as insurance p'raps. Now again I ask ya why?"

"Just that Kate Bellamy's got it."

Maw shook her head. She'd known the girl was back for the whole summer, of course. But Dickey…..

"I saw her today. She looks good."

Maw smiled. "Good. How's that…"

"Well it looked like it wasn't hurting her or anything. She's not a lefty no how." Dickey swiped another piece of bread on his way out the door and smacked a sleeping Coover on the back of the head on his way down the steps. His brother gave a shove and Dick's leg buckled right out from under him. There was a sick-sounding rip.

Coover winced and lifted his considerable bulk off of the bench to scrape his brother up off of the pavement. He was hurting. Fairly badly. Dickey wasn't ever speechless unless he was hurting bad. The youngest boy was afraid, in the back of his throat.

"'m sorry, Dickey." Coover was as gentle as he could manage, and he let his skinny older brother lean on him as they eased back up the steps. Maw met them with a handful of Vicodin and a glass of water.

She cussed Raylan Givens under her breath and wiped the sweat from her son's white-green face. No, old wounds just don't go away easy.

Margaret Bennett sometimes wondered what her middle boy would have been like if he hadn't been crippled in his prime that way. Would he have gone on? Would he have made something other than a gun hand of himself? He was her good left hand these days, and she was aware of the necessity of him. But as she helped Coover ease Dick's thin body down on the couch and watched him roil with nausea...in a rare moment Maw Bennett wished something better for her boy.


	5. Jimmy Abernathy

Jimmy Abernathy had long desired Kate, since she was a sophomore, most likely. What for, he couldn't say. It was just something to chase, and Kate privately doubted that the perverted English teacher would know what to do if he actually caught her. Kinda like a dog chasing a car. He was almost seventy now.

And he was just as gross now as he had been at fifty.

"Now my English Honors kids," he was saying, "have a summer list. I know it's a little late to be handing this off to you, but here." He passed her a battered sheet of paper with a list halfway down. Kate perused while Abernathy jawed, and then looked up, smiling and inspired. "You had them read Jack London?"

Abernathy paused mid-sentence. He didn't understand, initially, why she was so excited. And then it came to him.

"That's right. I remember now!" He chuckled. He would never tell his wife this, but he had heard nothing so sexy in his life as this young woman reading aloud from one of London's short stories. She was obviously taken with her subject, and the dulcet sounds of her sixteen year old voice had been…. "You always did like him, didn't you?"

"Him?" She laughed. "Jack London was a plagiarist of the highest order. The man was slime. His writing though…GAH." She grinned. "This is going to make my year so much easier!"

Mr. Abernathy didn't bother to ask her why. He just breathed a sigh of relief and started mentally packing his things for Louisville. He was going to miss the coeds, but this was a job that was meant for someone with energy, verve, and a powerful drive. He no longer met those qualifications.

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Kate took to the halls of the school, squeaking her shoes on the freshly waxed floor on purpose. It felt odd. She was coming back to her very own high school. Mrs. Willard was still the librarian. John Beecher was still the janitor. She was going to be teaching his granddaughter, he'd told her. Mrs. Willard still kept a bottle of Crown hidden inside the left hand bottom drawer on her desk—Kate could smell it on her breath when she walked in, and it made her feel like a scatter-brained fifteen year old again. The place had changed but little. Could it really be that the world had stopped turning in Harlan?

It seemed like it inside the school building. She went through the reference material and thanked GOD that most of the kids in her classes did not have easy access to the internet. Good. They'll learn how to do their research RIGHT. She milled around the classic literature section for old times' sake and then headed out the door.

Her current roster read like the roster her senior year. Some of the same names, with a 'junior' tacked onto the end. Some of them with their grandmother's maiden names for middle names, some of them named for Confederates of renown. A Jeb. Two There was a 'Lincoln,' and that surprised her. Lincoln was a Kentuckian, sure. But he was also a Yankee. She wondered what parent would do that to their child in these parts, and then she paused at the last name.

Bo Crowder had had daughters. He had married none of their mothers and had been present in no way save with money. Boyd had told her this one long night in the woods. The sons were worth more, Bo had said. But daughters Bo had had.

Lincoln had the right last name. It gave Kate pause. She guessed she would know in the coming week.

Ha. Bo Crowder would be rolling in his grave if he knew that any grandson of his was willingly taking an honors course in school.


	6. Johnny

A/N: I was talking the other day with a man who used to haul coal and work the mines in Harlan County Kentucky. The statement that he made to me, at least the one that stuck, was that "People down yonder are different. If they like ya right off the bat, they'll back you all the way. If they don't, they'll try to kill you. It just depends on how easy you are to kill." Considering that A.H. is a man that's missing seven inches off of his left leg, the better part of his right hand, and survived diving on a live grenade during his tour of duty in Grenada with the 1st Marine Recon, I'd say he did alright.

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Beer joints were not safe places in Harlan County. In a part of the world where you died if you didn't make a good first impression, doing so in the company of a bunch of drunks was not an easy thing to accomplish. Fights happened all the time. To that end, Cory Blevins kept a Judge and an aluminum ball bat underneath the bar. Her patrons knew it, and she only had to call the cops once or twice a week as a result. She had only used the Judge once in recent memory, and the man who had received that load of buckshot was no longer shooting pool. Or doing much of anything else.

Kate darkened the door of The Roadhouse on a Thursday evening wearing a pair of tight jeans and a leather jacket. Her hair was down, she was in a good mood, and had every intention of causing trouble. Cory took note of this and gave her the Harlan County Eye when she ordered.

"You're going to disturb the peace with your hair like that, missy."

Kate took the pale blonde locks between two fingers and examined a split end. "It's not THAT bad, is it Cory?"

Cory raised her brows and handed the woman a double whiskey. Kate didn't say anything, so Cory guessed that the drinking habits hadn't changed. The girl took her whiskey to a table, ordered cheese fries, and sat cross legged reading a book while she ate them. The whiskey got refilled twice, and then Kate got up and played pool. There were a handful of Bennett hands in the bar, but they treated the Bellamy girl like she was No-Man's-Land and played teams with her for four or five rounds. Kate finally got bored and ran the table on one big critter with the sturdiest set of jaws Cory had ever seen on a Harlan boy. He was perturbed.

Kate chalked her pool cue and racked the balls with a preciseness borne of inebriation and a lot of practice. She raised her head from the triangle and looked around. Her playmates were dispersing, and the bar seemed quiet to her buzzing ear.

"Play the winner?" A quiet voice spoke from her seven'o'clock. It wasn't…it wasn't…

She could see Cory behind the bar, and the older woman's eyes were keen on the pool table.

Kate took a breath, turned slow on her heel.

And then she couldn't help it. Because where she was looking was too high, and even the idea of John Crowder as a cripple was too much to handle and yet there he sat. He'd gone gray all through the sandy. The wheelchair was property of the county, and his eyes were dead. Tears hit the edges of her lashes and then just ran on over. She reached out for the pool table and hung on to the felt rail for dear life.

"Hi Kate," he drawled, rolling forward a couple of inches into the green-glass light from over top the pool table.

"Johnny…." She was almost breathless with sadness, and she pulled a chair over from a nearby table. "Johnny what happened?"

He was fighting for words himself. It wasn't like she'd left Harlan on good terms. It wasn't like the last time he'd seen her she'd been covered in raw red skin grafts and she was screaming. It wasn't like he could walk away from what had happened that summer.

So he was an ass about it. Safe place to be. "You'd'a known if you'd'a called, Miss Bellamy."

Her sadness went brittle and she stood up. "That goes both ways, John Crowder." She leaned over and lifted the crookedest pool cue she could find off the rack. "NOW play your winner."

"Where you been all these years?" He chalked the cue and looked down it, shaking his head. Kate heard something about 'crooked as a dog's hind leg' and ignored it.

"Colorado. Teachin'."

"Teachin' what? Chemistry?"

"English."

"Huh. Woulda pegged you for a chemistry teacher, truth be told."

"Your break," she said, rolling up the left sleeve on her new blue sweater. Johnny got the point, and it made his gut churn. Bellying up to the table, he twisted the cue in his hands, thinking about just how _bad_ his English was going to have to get in order to win this round.

It would be more than one round, at least. Kate knew this. When Johnny Crowder shot pool, it was serious business. She watched his eyes as he lined up on the bright yellow one-ball and smacked it. Balls scattered and the one and the five sunk.

"'member that pool table out at Bo's?"

"Yeah," Johnny drawled, sizing on the three-ball. "Bank to the middle pocket." He tried the shot and the pool cue got the best of him. "It wasn't level for shit. At least Cory's spent some money on her equipment."

Kate got low and combo-ed Johnny's solid two with the blue-striped ten. The ball was sloppy getting there, but it rattled in and Kate walked around the table to get the gist of her options.

"That wasn't very sportsmanlike," Johnny remarked.

Kate looked up. "Who was it taught me, John Crowder?"

He remembered. He remembered leaning over her back time and time again, helping her line up combos, explaining how English worked, kissing her just behind the ear as she was about to make a shot and the surprised squeak that followed. He remembered standing taller than Kate Bellamy too. He remembered when her left arm didn't look like cheap knotted satin. She'd had a tattoo on that arm.

She dropped three more before she bobbled on the twelve and scratched.

Johnny chuckled. "Getting confident?"

She shrugged and flipped her hair back over her shoulder.

"It looks good long like that." She flinched at the compliment.

He got down to business. Four more thunked and rattled down the pockets, and then the pool cue took an unexpected turn at the last second and left him setting with his six on the wrong side of the eight ball right up against the corner pocket. He cussed under his breath.

"Kate?" He looked up, looked around. Her pool cue was leaning against a table nearby, and he felt the blast of cold as the door smacked shut.

Cory was behind the bar, and the place was about empty. The woman poured him three fingers of Old Turkey and brought it to him across the sawdust.

"She was crying, Johnny."

Crowder lost himself into the glass Cory'd handed him and had the decency not to sob out loud.

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Winona spent the better part of midnight explaining what she knew. Kate alternated between listening and biting back the tears.

"Wi, I saw him and my ears literally started ringing! What...how has he lived? How has he even made it this far?"

"I don't know, honey," Wi said quietly. She was setting on the porch of the motel, wrapped in a blanket. "I just don't know."

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A/N II: I felt like I needed to clarify. The Judge that Cory has behind the bar is not a shotgun. It's actually a pistol that can chamber either .45 shells or a 410 shotgun shell. It's really good for close confines like…say….across a bar. In the car. A stall in the ladies bathroom. There's nothing else like it on the market. And you've got to have SUUUPER thick wrists to hold the thing steady.


	7. Gutterson

A/N: I don't own any of Dunham's skits. But if you want to see the ones I refer to here, they're on youtube.

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Johnny went home that night with Cory. The barkeep felt sorry for him. Hey, it was one way to get some around here. More than one woman who would have never laid a finger on John Crowder whole was quite willing to give him her all now that he was crippled. Crowder didn't have any illusions, and neither did Cory. Especially not after tonight.

Cory propped her head on his shoulder afterward and smoked the obligatory cigarette. "Can I ask about it?" She raised her brow calmly, and shrugged when he shook his head. "Is it something you need to talk to her about?"

"Maybe. I don't know, Cory. Lord, don't _talk_ about it any more." He plucked the cig from between her fingers and took a drag.

She shook her head at him. Cory Blevins had a knack for tasting regret in the air, and there was so much around Johnny Crowder right at that moment that she almost gagged. Combine that with the self pity and the effect was kinda noxious. "Get over yourself, Johnny."

She fought the temptation, the next morning, to push his wheelchair down the steps.

0oooooo0000000ooooo0000

Kate and Winona kept their scheduled 'girls night' date for Saturday evening down in Lexington. When she pulled up in front of the motel room, Raylan was leaning on the door frame.

"What is it with you, woman?"

"Huh?"

"Dont'cha know it's RUDE to call people after eleven'o'clock at night?"

Winona laughed from back in the bathroom. "He's just pissed cause the call wasn't for him!" She was yelling, and Raylan followed suit.

"Was NOT. I just don't like getting woke up by damn….Uncle Kracker…or whoever that is on your ringtone!"

Winona laughed. "I'm almost done, Katie, swear to God!"

Raylan rolled his eyes and Kate nodded in agreement. Ever since they were little, it had been Winona's prerogative to make them late. For Sunday School, for trips to the lake, for doctors' appointments….. Whatever she could make'em late for, she was going to do it. It was like Murphy's Law, only it was Winona's law. 'If you have relations with Winona and you can be late at all for something, you will be." Kate said as much, and Raylan laughed.

Kate dropped into the one and only room chair, and Raylan kept his post on the door frame. Things got quiet, and then he looked her in the face.

"You alright?"

She looked up at him, _knew _what he meant. "I…I don't know, Raylan." She shook her head. "He just seems like….all the starch is out of him, you know?"

Raylan nodded. "Winona told ya pretty much all of it, I think."

"Yeah." She shook her head again. "Lord, don't _talk_ about it any more."

Raylan nodded his assent. "Hey," he was chuckling. "I talked to Boyd the other day."

Kate smirked. "Didja now?"

"Yeah. He said he doesn't remember anything at all about Barton's Ridge and hadn't spent much time out there when he was in school."

"I didn't say anything about being in school, Raylan."

"I know. Neither did I." Givens chuckled. "What _did _y'all do out there?"

Kate snickered. "Oh no. I'll not reveal any more than Mr. Crowder will, sir. You can find that out your _own _self."

Raylan screwed his mouth up at that, and Kate couldn't help but think of the last time she'd seen him do that. He'd been ten and a half. Dickey Bennett had just paid his little brother Coover a quarter to squash Raylan's lunch sack on the bus. Pure, unadulterated Raylan. She giggled, and then Winona swept from the bathroom looking like she was ready to take Lexington by storm, at least for a night.

Raylan still had that screwed up look on his face when they left, and though Winona noticed, she called it the better part of valor and didn't ask. They caught a chick flick, ate a good steak, and talked shit about their respective jobs, or in Kate's case, the upcoming job.

To any casual observer, they looked like just a common pair of blondes out for the night and too old to cause much ruckus. Winona in her skinny jeans and Kate in her knee-high boots and both of them in _perfect colors _—it was an easy thing to look at, but really, they weren't any more noticeable than the kids two tables over that were dripping piercings. Gutterson didn't say anything, but he filed the fact away that Raylan's girlfriend/ex-wife was out on the town withOUT Raylan and WITH a woman that Tim didn't have a name for. Yet.

He knew Winona. Knew how she was good and solid all the way through, scatterbrained or not. Knew that she could be depended on to beat somebody with a phonebook or her high heels should it come to defending herself. But this other woman….from where Tim sat he could just make out the line of a stiletto blade against the seam of her boot, and he wondered why she'd put the thing on the outside. He laid a dime there was a gun in the purse, and her motions were guarded and careful.

He couldn't decide, either, whether she had dyed her hair that color or if it was natural. She was nearly platinum. Not white gold like Ava Crowder's pretty hair, but platinum. Her black eyes would make sense if she dyed her hair that way. If she hadn't, then all the more reason to find out about her. Gutterson's curiosity was piqued, and his internal search engine started making lists of where he needed to look. Somewhere in the midst of that, he ran across the Jeff Dunham skit with Peanut.

'You know, your wife's not exactly bad lookin'. In fact, she's ho**T**.'

'Yes she is.'

'And her prime is noooow!'

And in some wacky way, when Tim looked across the room at the bright blonde laughing over her wine, that was the word that came to mind. Precisely as the ventriloquist's puppet had said it.

'Ho**T.**'

He HAD to talk to Raylan about this gal.

And then Winona saved him the problem. She caught sight, raised one graceful arm, and motioned him over. He got up, swaggered over, and took the name of Kate Bellamy to the farthest recesses of his mind.

And the next morning when Raylan snuck up behind him and asked, in his ear, like the creep that he could be, just why he was looking up Kate Bellamy for a second time, Tim didn't really have an excuse. So he told the truth.

"Cuz she's ho**T**."


	8. Art I

"Who's hot?" Art asked, squeezing behind the desk with Raylan and Tim, looking over the sniper's skinny shoulder. "Whoozat?"

"She was Winona Hawkins' dinner date the other night," Tim said with interest. "I think she's ho**t**."

"Did she dye her hair like that?"

"Nope," Raylan drawled. "It's been that way since we were in school."

Art wheeled around and eyeballed him. "Know her, do ya?"

"Yup. Straight A's, could be paid to do homework-you got what you paid for- and she and Winona were kinda like a couple peas in a pod for a long time."

"She just visiting Winona then?"

"Nope, she's moved back home. Teaching English."

"Well good. I'm glad Winona's got somebody calm and quiet to run around with instead of…..."

The bark of laughter was simultaneous, and it was the fault of both Tim and Raylan that Art decided that it was in his best interest to keep the woman in the back of his mind. Raylan had known her for years, after all. That was enough to raise suspicion in and of itself.

Rachel rolled her eyes at the entire thing from behind her mountain of paperwork and carried on.

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Day 1 of Harlan County High:

"Miss Bellamy," she squeaked, "did you dye your hair like that?"

Day 2 of Harlan County High:

"You're telling me that _none of you _read the summer reading list?"

Day 3 of Harlan County High:

"Alright then. Here's what you're going to be reading instead." Kate dropped a seven hundred page book on her desk and every dozing head in the room jerked upright in surprise.

"It's Jack London. Lots of him. We're going to rip apart every short story in this volume, and if you want to pass the class, I'd suggest you do the extra credit report on The Sea Wolf , which can be found at the back of the book. It's only two hundred pages and you can hand it in at any point during the school year."

The entire class proceeded to be horrified.

"But Miss Bellamy, I've got cheerleading practice!" squeaked the little blonde that had asked about her hair.

"And I work after school!"

"I race four wheelers on the weekends!"

Kate held up a hand. "I have heard it all. I have also used them. Excuses are like…well, I don't think I have to tell you what they're like. Spare me the fussin'. You're going to find out when you get out of school that real life acts like this. Alright?

Who was it said they worked after school?"

A skinny boy with a black eye and a shock of electric blue hair raised his hand.

"I worked two part time jobs when I was getting my bachelors down at UK and worked as an exercise jockey at a training barn as needed. And I graduated with honors."

The blue-haired kid sat up straight as he pondered this.

"I was a cheerleader during high-school too, and I still managed to keep from losing my GPA. Listen close, because I'm only going to say this once. Y'all are in an honors course. I expect you to act like honors students. You will not breeze through this course."

The principal had been 'walking by' and had 'overheard the speech. Privately, he was thrilled. Mentally, he got ready for the tongue lashing he was going to get from at least three sets of angry parents.

And then Kate sat down and called the roll. Her boy Lincoln, the name she had noticed, had not deigned to show up for class, and she kind of doubted that he was the kid with the black eye and the blue hair—she hadn't seen him either in the past three days. Being a Crowder, or even a quarter Crowder, marked you well. Your hair stuck every which way but down, you were whipcord lean, you were strong, you were mean, and you were smart. You could do anything.

But when she rattled off the name 'Lincoln Moseby', almost under her breath, the boy raised his hand. She looked up. "Mr. Moseby, I couldn't help but notice you haven't bothered to show up for class these last two days. Why?"

Lincoln raised a brow. "I had better things to do?"

Kate looked him square in the eye. "I don't think you did, Lincoln. You mind waiting after class? I need to talk to you. Unless of course you're too busy…"

He shrugged, his eyes darkening. "Whatever."

Kate flipped the book on her desk open and began to read "The Test: A Klondike Wooing." She stopped three paragraphs in.

"Who's taking notes?" The kids looked up, dragged out their binders and began to scribble on the loose-leaf notebook paper.

She read until the bell, and then as they scrambled for the door, "You're gonna have a quiz on that!" And she was going to have to order books too.

She flipped open her roster sheet and started counting heads. There was no way Harlan was going to foot the bill for thirty out of print books. But Kate Bellamy would, and that was that.

A small clearing of the throat stopped her, and there stood Lincoln, his pack thrown over his shoulder, almost out the door.

"Still wanna talk, teach?"

She raised a brow and walked around the desk. "Yeah. Yeah I do."

The Moseby boy scuffed over and stopped in front of her.

"Get off the weed."

The boy reared back in surprise and she shrugged. "Just because I'm past thirty doesn't mean I don't know what it smells like or haven't partaken."

"What's it to you if I smoke?" Bravado.

"Nothin', really." Kate looked him in the eye. "I don't care. It's your prerogative and I can't stop you."

Lincoln straightened a little.

"But you can't smoke weed and learn at the same time. You come into class high or coming off of a high and you leave goin' 'Duuuuuude! Dude we talked about the coolest thing in class today, I mean, we solved the whole world's problems and shit!' And then somebody asks you how you done it and you go 'Uh….I don't remember.'"

Lincoln started laughing. He couldn't help it! He'd just had a flippin' TEACHER CUSS in front of him, and on top of that, she was talking about smoking weed like it was common as the dust on the books in the library."

Kate let his chuckle die off, and then finished. "So if you're going to smoke weed, kid…just drop out. Nobody's going to tell you this, but if you smoke enough of that stuff it starts frying parts of your brain that you need. You look at Coover Bennett and tell me I'm lyin'."

Lincoln was nonplussed. He liked Coover, for the most part. He wasn't nasty, and he taught. But she had a point.

"Make my point?" She broke his reverie, and he nodded.

"Yeah. I hear ya."

He walked out, still tripping on what Miss Bellamy had said, and skipped last period to go find and talk to Coover Bennett.

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A/N: That speech about weed...(laughs) I heard that first hand from a college professor my first semester in college. She was a woman who looks like she has had first hand experience in the described circumstance. Good teacher though.


	9. Boyd

When Kate walked out of the school for the evening, there was a live body under a cowboy hat perched on the hood of her truck. She stopped halfway there and just stood until Raylan looked up.

"What?" they asked simultaneously, and then Kate started laughing.

"I haven't been back THAT long, Raylan!" _Wow we synched up fast, _she thought.

"Long enough to stir up a nest though, girl."

Kate cocked her head and pulled the truck door open, throwing her bag inside and climbing up on the hood next to her former partner in crime. He looked off into the middle distance while she did so. She snorted.

"Huh?" He turned quick.

"You. You're such a friggin' drama queen."

And for once in his life, Raylan did not argue. "It is what it is, Kate."

She settled onto the hood. "Explain yourself, Mr. Givens. How come we're sitting out here in plain view of the world and Harlan County if you've got a warning for me?"

"Because I got a point to make, is all."

"So this is all staging?"

"I can neither confirm nor deny." He turned the narrow edge of his eye toward her, and she chuckled. He took his hat off and scratched along the base of his neck.

"Kate…Kate listen. I been thinkin' about what happened the other evening with Johnny, and it worries me."

"How come?"

"Because I know you. And I know what you're thinkin' and I know what Johnny's probably thinkin' and I don't think that it's a good thing."

Kate shook her head. "Raylan, we just had this discussion last week. A slight variation, but we DID just have this discussion."

"Dog to its vomit. Right."

"You didn't believe me, did you?"

"Nope. Not about Johnny, anyhow."

She frowned. "You really think I'm that easy to blow over?"

He turned and looked her straight in the face. "I don't know, Kate. Are ya? You've been gone a real long time and you don't know what kinda fire's burning back here at home. You _don't _and that's a fact, Kate. You can't just step back in like you know all the moves and everything's fine, cause you DON'T and it's NOT."

It left her flatfooted. She just sat, quiet, for a good minute and a half before she began to speak. Raylan didn't move. He knew enough to wait her out.

"Okay. So….I really hoped…when I came back home…that there would be some folks that had faith in my good sense. That there would be somebody that knew that I had my head on my shoulders. And I _thought_...Raylan, I thought you knew that. I thought you really did know that."

He sighed. "I….I know, Katie. I know you've got sense."

"No you don't. Otherwise we wouldn't be having this conversation.'

"Well you were cryin' to Winona about that dirtbag the other evening…."

She rolled her eyes. "_Raylan. _I am a _woman. _I get upset when I see people I care about in less than ideal conditions. And I sometimes CRY about it. That is _normal_."

"Kate. Just…..alright. Listen. Tim Gutterson saw you and Winona out the other night and he looked you up the other day at work and I caught him. He's a damn snoop, but the boss saw it, and Art's one of them people that remembers the names and faces and histories of folks he met three decades ago just because he can and now you're on his radar and you're thinkin' about nosin' around Johnny Crowder, don't tell me you aren't cause I see it in your face, and you're gonna be on his radar in an even BIGGER way if you line up with the Crowders again."

Kate snickered. "You realize they refer to those things as run-on sentences."

"I'm serious, Kate. You don't want that kind of recognition. You don't want to give _anybody _any kind of reason to suspect you."

"Well why's he suspect me now?" She was getting confused, and she wished that Raylan would stop fussing and just get to the poin!

Raylan did the patented Raylan Givens sigh and looked up. "Cause I mentioned that I grew up with ya."

Kate took in the fact, let it settle, and then she started to laugh. Long and hard.

"So in OTHER words. The reason you took the time out of your busy schedule and came down here and park your ass on the hood of my truck _is _that you're sorry that I'm guilty by association?"

"Uh…"

"_Guilty_, Raylan! I'd rather be guilty for growin' up with the folks I grew up with than anything else in the _world!_ Y'all MADE my childhood! And there isn't a thing I'd go back and replace…."

Raylan laughed, half at himself. "Except for whatever it was that happened out on Barton's Ridge?"

She paused midsentence and raised a finger. "Except for that. Maybe."

"Only maybe?"

"Only maybe. It was kinda fun."

"What happened?"

"Nope. Not tellin'."

Bickering led to a desire for ice cream, which led to walk down to the Tastey-Freeze, which led to a conversation about why it wasn't smart to eat ice cream outside when the temperature was threatening fifty and the realization that neither of them really cared. By the time they parted ways, Kate felt like she'd had roughly twenty years pulled off of her shoulders. She'd just spent the afternoon with her very own best-friend-lovin' frog catchin' snake-thowin' turtle-eatin' Raylan Givens.

0ooooooo0000000ooooo0000

Winona laughed into the phone. "He really ate a mud turtle?"

Raylan looked up from his paperwork and crinkled his forehead.

"Well," Kate chuckled, "we all did. Chopped the things head and feet off, threw it in the pot, and then peeled off the bottom half of the shell. We had pair of salt and pepper shakers and just kinda passed the shell around with them and ate it with our fingers." She laughed. "That was the BEST camping trip EVER. We ate like royalty and did literally NOTHIN'. For a whole WEEK."

Winona shook her head. The only reason she'd been left out of this particular extravaganza was because she'd had the flu, and had cried the entire week while Kate and the boys were gone."

"It was you and Raylan and…who all?"

"Me, Raylan, Boyd, Johnny, and Everett Miller, I think. We were flippin' twelve years old. Twelve years old, can you believe that? Out in the river bottom all by ourselves except for when we made supply runs back up the mountain."

Raylan had heard that last scrap of the statement and he shook his head. "We weren't all by ourselves either. Aunt Helen was down there every other night just checkin' on us."

"Kate, did you hear him?"

"Yeah….How come she never came into the fire?"

Raylan laughed out loud. "Cause I told her NOT to!"

Kate laughed with them, and finally, after about five minutes more of Raylan third-partying, Winona finally just put the phone on speaker and threw it down on top of Raylan's paperwork. The conversation took its twists and turns for another hour or so, and then the phone started beeping and Kate excused herself:

"School night!"

"Seeya later, Kate."

"You too, Raylan."

"Hey, when are we going to Lexington again?"

"Well, what about going to see Fast Five?" she asked, and Winona squeaked.

"Ooo, Vin Diesel!"

They hung up giggling, and Raylan made a snide comment about not ever letting his woman watch any of the Fast and Furious series all by herself ever again.

0ooooooo00000000ooooo0000

Kate got up from the kitchen table and padded across the cracked linoleum. She was going to have to get that replaced at some point or another, but she just didn't have the funds yet. Besides that, the floor underneath was still good.

She looked back over her shoulder at Monte, a sleepy blue ball on the rug at the kitchen sink. "Hey little man. You wanna go outside?"

The puppy was instantly awake and by the door, his little blue butt wagging the rest of him in excitement. Kate glanced up at the clock as she propped the screen open. It was 11:43PM.

Kate watched him skitter across the wide porch and then freeze of a sudden at the edge of the steps. The only time a puppy growl is threatening is if the puppy never growls without cause. Monte was growling with all of his 10-week-old lungs and the hair on his little back stood straight up. He began to bark with every fierceness he could muster, and it was all Kate could do to catch him before he flung himself off the steps and out of the porch light.

"Wait a minute, buddy!" She scooped him up, and then a quiet chuckle chilled her right down to the bones in her bare heels. Her stomach flopped.

Boyd Crowder stepped up into the sick yellow circle thrown by the bare bulb, his hands deep in his pockets and a smile like she never remembered seeing on his face. He looked like a crocodile. He looked infinitely darker than he had before.

"That's quite the watchdog you've got there, Kate."

She bit back on the second scream and glared. "Boyd Crowder if you intend to call on me you can damn well knock on the door. Or leave it til mornin'! How long have you been out here?"

"Oh, about an hour or so. I didn't wish to interrupt your conversation with Raylan and Winona."

The hair on the back of her neck rose like Monte's. The puppy still growled in her arms. "Get your fool ass in this house. And make whatever you have to say quick, because I am going to bed in about fifteen minutes." She turned on her heel and opened the door. "Cummon."

Boyd came up the steps quietly, stepped calmly through the door and took a seat unbidden at her kitchen table.

Monte went in his crate for the night, where he planted himself as close to the door as he could get and continued to growl in the back of his throat. Kate remembered very clearly then what Raylan had said earlier. First about Boyd's interesting cuts of cloth, and then about being out of rhythm with the dance. She gritted her teeth, pushed one mug across the table at Boyd and hopped up on the counter. Her cutlery block was within easy reach. She had a mug of hot liquid in her hand. She was about as ready for this as she was going to get.


	10. Boyd II

A/N: Blackberry 'shine. Just sayin'.

* * *

><p>Boyd smiled down into his cup and looked up at her after a second. "I understand you ran into Johnny last Thursday?"<p>

"Boyd, you can either come at this sideways for three days or you can tell me exactly why you're here. If you opt for the former, I'm gonna tell you to get the hell out of my house."

Not the graceful entry he was looking for, but oh well. "He is in a deep distress over the whole thing and I don't like seeing my good right hand in such a kind of shape." He looked at her expectantly.

Kate was incredulous. "What am I supposed to do about it, exactly?"

Boyd's face became open. "Help him."

"Help him _what _Boyd? Get over himself? Turn loose of the fact that it wasn't his fault no matter how you roll them dice? He wanted it to be. You know he did. And he's carried that damn guilt ever since then." Her teeth were on edge. Screw it.

She jumped down off of the counter and pulled a blue glass bottle down from the shelf above the refrigerator and poured a finger in her coffee.

Boyd cocked his head in curiosity. "I don't recognize that…."

She snorted. "You wouldn't." Then a pause. "You want a slug?"

"In my coffee?"

"It'll be interesting, I promise."

He shrugged and offered the mug. She poured less than her own serving in with the coffee.

"Stir it," she ordered, swirling her own coffee mug a couple of times. She took a sip and hopped back up on the counter.

Boyd did as he was told, and then sampled. Whatever the stuff was, his coffee didn't taste like coffee any more. It was smooth; a combination of potent alcohol, blackberries, and half a smidgen of bitter chocolate.

"Ava would like this."

Kate didn't respond, but motioned with a small hand for him to continue.

"He's all apart, Kate. And I am here as a concerned friend and relative."

She spoke between sips. "Boyd….if Johnny had any gall….or BALLS….he would have called me and settled this himself. I highly doubt the man would appreciate what you're doin' at the moment."

"Well, there are times when a person can't really see what they need to do, and if the other person doesn't know, then the one that's hurtin' really can't get any help from'em, can they?"

Kate hurled the mug at Boyd's head and shot high. Hot coffee went everywhere and the mug shattered on the doorframe. "The one that's hurtin'. The one that's _hurtin' _huh?" She spoke the words low and hard in the back of her throat.

Boyd opened his mouth, and then realized that he had no say. He had no room to talk in that situation. He took another sip on the coffee-alcohol and slowly rose to his feet.

"I was remiss in coming, Kate. I am sorry that I troubled you so late in the evening."

"I bet you are." She hissed it.

He turned and stepped quietly through the door. Kate locked it behind him.


	11. Ava

_0ooooooo0000000ooooo00000_

_That afternoon_

She didn't finish the blue glass bottle-it was the last of that batch. But she almost did. She started throwing up at 3. The next day was a _hangover_. A _MEAN_ hangover. She was hard with the quiz, and as he walked out, Lincoln snickered at her.

"You know weed don't do that, right?"

She gave him one bloodshot Eye, and he grinned in her face. She couldn't help laughing with him at that point, because the whole situation was just ridiculous.

"Not as bad, any how. Quit makin' me laugh. My head's gonna fall off."

"Water, teach."

"No kiddin', rookie."

He walked out the door.

"Hey!" she called after him, and he stopped. "Go to class!"

"Where else would I be goin'?"

"Lincoln…."

He gave. Kate bent her head to grading the quizzes. The four-wheeler racer's name was Jeb. He had neither taken notes nor had read the text, and she painted a brilliant red 'F' across his quiz. It was only five points, but still. It was frustrating. The cheerleader (Amy) did surprisingly well, and Lincoln had…(she shook her head). Of course he'd nailed it.

She was going to have to talk to Jeb. And she was going to have to stop being so hard on Amy. The world looked a little more level this afternoon than it had at 2 this morning.

0ooooooo0000000ooooo0000

_That morning_

Ava was pacing when Boyd hit the steps that night. He pulled her into a hug and she hung on his neck for a little bit before she stepped back and looked at him. "You alright?"

He nodded, and Ava ran a thumb over his right eyebrow and then put one hand flat on his chest. "Lyin' to me, Boyd Crowder." He wrapped on of his hands around hers and kissed the knuckles.

She smiled sad. "Come to bed, ya lyin' fool."

"Your lyin' fool."

"And mine only."

They didn't talk til the morning light, and then it was in the kitchen.

Boyd cleared his throat. "I spoke to Katie Bellamy last night."

Ava turned and raised her brow. "The new English teacher?"

"Yes."

"I don't remember very much about her. She was a senior when I got to Harlan High."

"Well I remember a great deal about her, and I daresay Johnny a great deal more."

Ava stood still, thinking about that torch-white hair the girl had. "Are you wantin' me to ask you _why _you was talkin' to her?"

"I may be making inroads on certain skills she's got. And I wanted you to know beforehand that, if it goes through, I will be conducting business with her."

Ava digested this. "You seem awful confident about that."

"She's got unfinished business with Johnny and it's killin' the both of them."

Ava, like Mary the Mother of Christ, pondered these things in her heart. She couldn't really wrap her head around anybody having any kind of serious business with Johnny that had anything to do with matters of the heart. And that was the only way she could think of to interpret what Boyd had said about Kate Bellamy.

Johnny had been bitter and angry when he _wasn't _a cripple, and now…..she shook her head. She just couldn't see him any other way. But hey. She used to think that Boyd was creepy too, and that just goes to show you that you shouldn't judge folks by your first impression of'em. The name 'Bowman' whispered in the back of her head and she swept it away. It was followed by "_I'm gonna shoot you, dummy_," and then some sick part of her had to laugh. She'd only traded one kind of bondage for another, but _damn_ didn't she feel free in Boyd Crowder's arms.

"Well?" Boyd cut into her thoughts with a kiss to the forehead.

"Well just remember who you belong to, Boyd. I said no whores and I won't tolerate sluts either."

He pulled her close. "You don't need to fret your head about that. I have a good working relationship with that girl, but I couldn't touch her heart in a million years. She wishes nothing to do with me."

"Well alright then."

Ava fed the man breakfast and then took her time getting ready for work. She wasn't truly hungry this morning, so she didn't bother. She was due to open, and then she had a good eight or nine hours ahead of her. As Harlan's best colorist, she was privy to all the gossip in the world, and she part of it.

She just shook her head.

_0ooooooo000000ooooo0000_

_Later that afternoon_

"Hey Ava, have you got time for a walk-in?"

She looked up from the dust pan and raised a brow. "What's she want?"

"A cut. Just a cut, right honey?"

"Yeah, please. But only if you've got the time…I just scooted in here last minute…."

"Oh come on over here." Ava waved her over, smiling. "I'm Ava."

"Nice to meet you, Miss Ava. I'm Kate Bellamy." She stuck out her hand without thinking.

A half-pause and both of them had their balance again.

Ava cleared her throat. "Well just have a seat right here, Kate. What're we doing to this mane of yours today?"

"Cut. Cut it all off." Ava paused with a good handful of the three foot long cornsilk between her fingers and stared at Kate in the mirror.

"Are you sure?"

"Yup. I don't mean shave it off, but I want it about as short as my face shape can handle."

Ava shook her head in shock. "Well…well do you want to give it to Locks of Love while we're at it?"

Kate smiled at that, and Ava went to work. They talked about small things. How long Kate had been in Harlan. What Colorado was like. Where Ava'd gotten her certifications from. Bad dye jobs. Broken down trucks. They laughed together, and if you didn't know better, you would have said they'd been friends for years.

Ava whirled her around to face the mirror. Kate sat up straight in the chair and raised a hand to the polished pixie cut in surprise. Her dark eyes were almost huge in her small face, and as she got up and Ava took the cape off of her shoulders, she felt suddenly tiny. She _looked _smaller, even.

"I like it," she said, and Ava nodded in agreement.

"You wear it good."

Kate was subdued. "Thank you."

She wrote out a check, ripped it from the checkbook, and handed it to Ava.

"Oh honey, you're supposed to write it out to The Hair Hutch, not me!" Ava laughed kinda loud, and Kate flushed. Ava tore up the check between her long fingers, and waited as she finished the second check.

"There ya go." Kate smiled and left it on the counter, swinging out the door ramrod straight. Ava started gathering all that white blonde hair up and putting it in a bag for Locks of Love, and then looked up when the door banged back open.

"Did you forget something, honey?"

Kate stopped at the counter, eyes almost too wide to bear. "Ava, you know who I am, right?"

Ava Crowder drew herself to her full height. "I know that my man knows more about you than most people around here." She set the bag down at her sink and joined Kate at the counter.

"Do you think I'm here to make trouble?"

Ava stared her straight in the eye, her jaw starting to jut out. "Are ya? All I ever heard about you was that you were too good for this country, Miss Bellamy. And you're back here teachin' school? For what? The _money?_"

Kate shook her shorn head and spoke with a too-heavy sadness. "I'm back home because I don't have any other place to land, Ava. And yes. I was close with Boyd when I was in school. I was close with Raylan too, and still am. How's _that _make ya feel? Both of'em you walked second hand to me."

Ava swallowed a spark of fury and curled her hands in. Kate wasn't done, and it's only fair, if you're going to start something, that you know where the other one's standing. She waited.

"I want you to understand something though. I was _never _as close with either one of them as I was with Johnny. I say that knowing that I can finish Raylan's sentences. And I want you to understand this more than anything. I know how Boyd works. I can't live with how he works. I can spend all the time in the world with him, but he ain't never gonna be something that I want. His heart is too hard to get to, and the fact that _you got there_…..You got no call to be jealous of me. Or jealous over Boyd."

Ava leaned over the counter, the Kentucky in her blood coming out in the raw bones of her face. "You'll honor that."

Kate stood square. "Yes, Ava."

Ava sat back on her heels then and took a breath. "Alright then."

Kate turned to leave again, and then stopped. "Hey Ava?"

She looked up from the rest of the blonde hair on the floor. "Yes?"

"You got no reason to worry about losin' what's yours. If you're walking around inside Boyd Crowder's heart he ain't never gonna let you go."


	12. Coover

"No really!" Lincoln was laughing so hard his ribs hurt, and Coover Bennett was howling so loud he was starting to get hoarse. He came up for air shaking his head.

"Ain't no way."

"_Yes _way, man, _yes _way."

"Teachers, man. Can't trust'em."

Lincoln snickered. "She was so hung over she looked like she'd shrunk. And just the day before she rattled off the biggest pile-a-shit about smokin' pot and what it does to your brain and I just...just couldn't HANDLE it, ya know?

"Well who is it?"

"Umm….Miss Bellamy. I don't know what her first name is." Lincoln took a long draw on his little green pipe and rolled his head back on his shoulders.

Coover looked up from the floor. "Kate?"

"Yeah. Kate. Kate's her name."

"Well damn."

"You know her?"

"She…." Coover was shaking his head again. He looked like an old brown bear rattling the water out of his ears. "She used to do my homework for me."

Lincoln raised his brow magnanimously. "Teachers. Can't trust'em."

Coover never mentioned it to anybody, but Kate didn't charge him the arm and the leg she'd charged Dickey. In fact, she wouldn't take money or grass or anything at all from him. He'd TRIED. He left a fifty dollar bill in her locker door one time and found it wrapped around the windshield wiper of his truck. He left a bag of his best grass in the bed of her beat-up El Camino under the spare and she'd had an outright fit. It was beyond Coover why anybody wouldn't want his grass, and he was a little hurt by it. But hell. He got a hug out of the whole business and it had made Dickey so jealous his face had turned green for a week. So he just shut up and Kate kept doing his homework and one day, halfway through the summer when he was showing his Mama what he was growing it came out.

* * *

><p>She reached out and smacked him on the back of the head. "Why in the world aren't you doin' it your own damn self!" She frowned. "Smoked too much pot. I know that's what you done, Coover."<p>

"Well Mama I don't….I don't understand it! It don't make sense! All them adjective and conjunctions and equations and shit and…"

"Did Doyle help you?"

"I…I didn't wanna ask'im." Coover had hung his head, the shame creeping up his cheeks. "I tried that a'fore. He wouldn't."

"Well what about Dick?"

"Huh-uh. He won't neither."

"Does she make ya understand it?" Maw leaned forward on her toes and straightened her shoulders.

"When I ask questions, yeah she does. Makes it easy, almost. She…" He grinned here, half looked up. "She showed me them horticulture books at the library. The ones about growin' things, and crossin'em up."

Maw rocked back on her heels then and looked up at her youngest child. "Alright then. You keep doin' what you're doin'. I'll deal with your brothers in my time, Coover."

* * *

><p>So Coover had graduated with a C average from highschool and had ordered and read every book he could find on cross pollination and growing things in mountain topsoil. He had a whole bookshelf of'em at the barn. He was leaning up against that bookshelf right at that moment, and he wondered what Kate was doing back here. He wondered, too, whether she would get back in the business. And what might have to be done if she did.<p> 


	13. Lincoln

A/N: Yes. This is my OC. Yes, he's not even in the show. But he would be if Graham Yost knew everything about him that I do. In The Bible, if a verse starts with the word 'behold', it's because you're supposed to pay attention to what's said in it. So-

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Lincoln wheeled around the corner the next Monday and asked himself, before he realized what he was saying, what that punk kid was doing behind Miss Bellamy's desk. Then he did his obligatory double take and she literally cackled out loud.

"Behold! Lincoln Moseby!" Kate sang out. She literally looked like a teenager with a punk-rockabilly predilection. The little green sweater just didn't look like it fit her personality any more, and he wondered. Lincoln decided he felt a little bit vindicated about his own blue mop at that point. The class took a vote on her new hair, and it was half and half. Lincoln and Amy voted for it, and Jeb against.

"I _liked _it longer," he said, half under his breath.

"You like passing classes, too, don't you?" Kate walked around her desk and hopped up on it, swinging her legs. He looked up in surprise. Got made an example of in front of the whole class. Fumed under his breath.

When class let out, the students kind of fell out of the room in a rush. Jeb waited until he was certain there wasn't an authority figure in ear shot, and then reached out and banged Lincoln Moseby's head off of a locker.

He waited until Lincoln got up. It took him a while….the blow had rattled his brain pretty good.

"What the _hell _was _that _for?" Lincoln spit the words, ratcheting himself up underneath his Army Surplus pack.

"Why, just because I can, shrimp-man." Jeb grinned the grin of a football king, just as entitled as if he were Harry and Will's illegitimate brother.

Lincoln walked away. He knew _exactly _where Jeb Moran got his weed, and he had every intention of using what he knew and who he knew to his advantage.

"Ain't you gonna stay and fight?"

Lincoln kept walking.

"Aw cummon!"

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A/N: Also, as you can tell, it's a bit of a filler. I have some goodness coming up. I'm just not sure how to place it yet. (grins)


	14. Winona I

_TGIF_

Winona stood agog for a full thirty seconds when Kate knocked on the door.

Kate shifted from one foot to the other, dug her hands in her pockets. "Is it really that bad, Wi?"

It broke the trance. "What? No, it's just….."

"Diiiif'ernt." Raylan remarked as he came down the steps past his woman and strolled on out to the car. "Are y'all comin' or not?"

Kate rolled her eyes and Winona shook her head. True to his word, Raylan was not allowing Winona to watch Vin Diesel without him being present. And then there were the cars. Of course there were the cars.

They came out of the theater. "I still can't get over your _hair._" Winona reached out and ran her hand through the piecey cut and stared. "It's just…."

"_Diff'ernt,_" finished Raylan, as if it were the only practical answer in the world. "Come on. Lets go have a drink."

Drink they had. And then another drink, and then another, and then they started getting annoyed at one another and decided that, in the interest of the safety of the good people of Lexington, they had probably better get a cab.

"But how'm I gonna get home?" Kate looked down at Raylan from her perch on the bar and he waved her away with his hat.

"You'll go home t'morra, kay-dee-did."

"Sk.." she hiccupped and Winona laughed. "School? Wait no. Tomorrow's Saturday." Winona yanked Kate down off of the bar and they tottered out the door.

"Raylan's got the ta-aab, Raylan's got the taaa-ab!" Winona sang out, and Kate was on the bandwagon too by the time he got the cab called and made it out the door.

"Here, ya stinkin' monkeys. Have some peanuts." He threw them a handful and Winona managed to actually catch one in her mouth. A moment was taken by all to appreciate this display of skill.

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Art slung an arm around Faylene's shoulders and they strolled, as was their wont this time of night. For whatever reason, neither of them had been sleeping for quite a while, and one evening, Faylene looked up from her cup of tea and suggested that they go for a walk.

"Darlin' it's 11:30 at night!"

She chuckled. "It's also bright as day out yonder, lawman. And come on now. How long has it been since you and me took a stroll under a good full moon?"

He couldn't argue with that, so they walked and he chalked the foolishness up to the full moon. Two weeks later he realized, as he was stepping out the door at 11:15PM, that he could no longer blame it on that.

Faylene let out a huff of cold night air and leaned against him as they walked. "We aren't going to be able to do this much longer, you know?"

He nodded and pressed a kiss into her hair. "Uh-huh. Winter's comin' on."

That wasn't what she'd meant, and he knew it. 'Lene would be lucky to be walking by the time winter got here. He didn't want to bother with that fact.

"Shut yourself up, Art Mullin." She stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek.

He chuckled. "Sure is a pretty night."

A car was coming down the street behind them, and the two of them eased over, giving the Yellow Cab room. It wasn't uncommon for'em to take sharp detours to the sidewalk. Art stopped stock still, though, when he saw the back of a particularly familiar hat seated between two lovelies. Hmmmmmm. He shook his head.

"What?" 'Lene raised a slim silver brow at him, tongue firmly in cheek.

Art just shook his head. "That boy's just determined to run himself into an early grave, is all."

"Who was it?"

"Oh...just an old boy I work with. And his ex-wife, I think. And her best friend, maybe."

"Well that sounds like a winning combination."

Oh Gutterson was going to be sorry that he'd missed this.

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_Saturday_

Raylan _did _make an appearance at work the next day, and Art just smiled. The kid gave him that twist-mouth what're-you-lookin'-at look. Tim caught it all and began to pry, and Rachel-God bless that girl- just rolled her eyes and kept on.

At lunch it was—"What were you up to last night, Raylan?"

"Movie," he mumbled around his roast beef sandwich. "Wif Wino—" he swallowed. "With Winona. A movie with Winona and Kate."

Gutterson brightened.

"Don't look at me like that. She cut all her hair off."

Tim was nonplussed. "You mean like…_off_?"

"Mmm. Yeash. Bawd as'n aig." Raylan poured it on around his sandwich, enjoying Gutterson's depressed-puppy reaction.

"And how come you're askin', Art? What were you doing sweepin' around the square with Faylene on your arm? Ain't 11:30 past your bed time?"

"The joy of being a parent, Raylan, is that you don't have a bed time any more and you can stay up as long as you want. And besides. My wife asked me."

Rachel looked up from her paperwork and smiled. "You're too sweet for this job, Art. Far too sweet."

"Why thank you, Rachel." He bowed in her direction and took himself on back to his office.

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Winona and Kate limped themselves back to Harlan and wound up camping on Kate's couch watching Intolerable Cruelty. And when Clooney got all wound up over Mrs. Rexroth and watched her walk down the hall going "You _fascinate _me," Winona chimed right in, almost pitch perfect. Kate almost fell off the couch laughing. Monte was concerned, and whined a little.

"Oh I'm sorry buddy!" Winona reached down and scratched him behind his ears. Then Kate cleared her throat.

"I've seen that look before, my friend."

"Huh?"

"That far-and-away look you get when you're pitchin' headlong over your heels for the man."

"I….oh lord, Kate. I'm just….I'm so in love with my ex-husband right now I could bust."

Kate smiled quietly. "Better him than Gary, anyhow."

"Oh now. Gary wasn't ALL that bad."

Kate raised a brow.

"He did iron his underwear though, which I thought was just _weird_."

"I bet he had a gay lover that called him Matilda somewhere in the woodwork too." Kate was deadpan, but she couldn't hold it.

Winona cackled. "That would have been hysterical."

The phone rang. It was laying in the middle of the livingroom floor and Kate walked out to it on her hands instead of just standing up and picking it up. "Hello?"

She worked her way backwards to the couch. "Uh-huh…..Are you _serious_?"

Winona heard on syllable.

"Wow." Kate said it hushed. "Wooooow Henry."

There was more speech that Winona couldn't hear.

"Well what're they going to do with her?"

Winona watched her friend's face morph in horror.

"What? NO!"

A short sound from the phone.

"Well dammit I'LL take her!"

An inquisitive squeak.

"No no no, I'm just down the road. I live in Harlan County, Henry. I'm not that far out."

Another pause.

"_Yes_ I've got the ground. I'm setting on fifty acres in the clear, Henry. She'll have all the room she needs."

Another set of squawks.

"She can be a fifteen hundred pound yard ornament, for all I care! They can't DO that to her! She's only _ten!_"

Winona set dead upright at that. Kate was CLEARLY not describing anything human. Winona smelled a call to the truck in the making.

"Okay then. We'll meet you at the Bennett exit. Wrap her legs, Henry. And…..oh my lord." Kate squeaked. "Oh I'm getting excited now!"

A sarcastic snort from the phone.

"Four o'clock then?"

An affirmative.

"See you then. Henry….._THANK you._" Kate turned off the phone and swiveled her head toward Winona.

"Kate, your head's about to fly off."

"Oh I know," she said airily, and grinned like a cat with canary feathers sticking out of its mouth. "I…I'm about to wax all horse-y on you, Wi, okay? Can you bear with me?"

"You're getting a horse?"

"**Yes.**"

"Why?"

"Because she's a grand old queen and her feet have gone bad from a fever. And she's the mother of some pretty amazing stayers. And once upon a time, when I was the exercise jock for Henry Newman's fillies, she and I had a thing."

Winona just looked at her.

"A mile in two minutes that horse ran for me, Winona. _A mile in two minutes."_ Kate jumped trains of thought. "I need a stock trailer. Do you know anybody in the county that could loan me a stock trailer?"

"Well….no….not right off the top of my head…"

"OH!" Kate grabbed up the phone and reached for the phone book.

"Ava? Ava! Just the person I wanted. Listen, is that old stock trailer still setting down behind the barn at your place? What kind of shape are the tires in? Yeah? Do you know if the lights work? Well, we don't have to go far anyway. What about the brakes? Good. Do you think it could make it to the Bennett exit and back? Good. Can I borrow it?"

A pause.

"Cause a friend of mine just gave me a horse. And the van's meeting me at the Bennett exit at 4 this afternoon."

There was a long pause on Ava's end.

"I'll pay you for the rent of it, if that'll make it easier for ya…. Yes I know how to pull a stock trailer." Slight pause. "Okay? Okay. Thank you sooooooo much, Ava. We'll be down there shortly!"

It was here that Winona realized that she was not going to have a relaxing Saturday any longer. It was going to be centered around this horse. And Kate was going to go ba-naaaaaaaanas until it was all through and the four legged beast was tucked safely in for the night.

She pulled her socks up from where they'd puddled around her ankles and started looking for her sneakers. Never a dull moment. Never ever.

Kate squeaked for joy as the screen door slammed and Monte had to scramble to keep up with her.

* * *

><p>AN: The horse is real. She's just 5, not 10. She hasn't had any colts yet, either. She's just a 1500 lb yard ornament at the moment. Her name is Hailey Min, but while she's in my fic she's going by Min. Don't ask questions; it'll make your head spin. But that grin I'm wearing in my avatar? Her fault.


	15. Ava II

A/N: Ten points to whoever can tell me where the quote came from withot feeding it to Google. Happy Memorial Day.

* * *

><p>"Where'd the stock trailer go?" Boyd looked around from the kitchen sink window, still wrist deep in the dishwater. Ava was buttering toast.<p>

"I loaned it to Kate Bellamy. She was picking up a horse yesterday evening. Said she'd bring it back by today."

Boyd nodded. Horses. Why Kate liked horses he would never ever know.

And when it became clear that afternoon when she returned the trailer that Kate couldn't even RIDE the horse…Boyd raised the flat of his hands in resignation and shook his head.

Ava walked Kate back down to her truck and then came back to the house with a blue glass pint bottle. "She said she found some more from the same batch." The '_like I'm supposed to know what that means_' went unspoken and Boyd realized that there was clarification in order. He took the better part of valor and put two fingers in two glasses while he explained himself. And he made a note to thank Kate and figure out where-ever it was that she'd gotten that stuff because she was right. Ava DID like it.

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-Its a white elephant- Raylan texted back.

The reply was indignant. -No she's NOT!-

-You caint even ride it-

-YET! Once her legs and feet heal up I can! Her name is MIN.-

-Uh-huh-

-Shut up Raylan.-

His reply was simple. - : P –

And then she didn't respond.

Raylan was inordinately pleased with his newfound texting ability. He had to fight the urge to text Art and ask stupid questions or send Gutterson pictures of his last shot target at the pistol range. He didn't tell anybody that he had to fight these urges. It would have been unbecoming. But he had them all the same and it tickled his funny bone. He had been in a good mood all week because of it.

Art was suspicious.

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It rained all week. Jeb pointedly did not come to class for three days in a row, and when he ducked in on Thursday, his boots were covered in a good sticky mud.

Kate fussed about her horse's feet to anybody that would listen. Lincoln was surprisingly quiet. Amy fought with her hair-she straightened it every morning, and when you were born with Shirley Temple curls you just didn't win a battle against humidity. The week bore on.

And Johnny slammed the phone down every day, almost regular as clockwork, at 7PM every night. He was lucky to get six numbers into it. He'd given in to a moment of weakness and looked up the house number to the Peabody place. It was still under Pa Peabody's name-he guessed she hadn't had it changed over yet, or that it would show up in the next phone book. And he suspected that, IF she answered the phone, she would rattle off "Willard Peabody's, he's not here right now…" or something just as stupid.

He looked up as Boyd's old two-tone pulled up the lane. The wheelchair wasn't quite as nimble as he would have liked lately, and he considered getting his cousin to grease the wheels while they sat a-plotting. Drugs were the most lucrative thing they could get their finger in at the moment. Quiiiiiiiiiiiiick turn around and a guaranteed steady cash flow sounded real good to a bar-less bar-keep and a disgraced soldier with a marred history. He couldn't help but laugh when the line crossed his mind.

"A legend and an outta-work bum look an awful lot alike, Daddy." Little Enos Burdette. Good GRIEF how long had it been since he'd actually watched that movie?

Kinks needed to be worked out, of course. But that was simply their business.

Boyd hit the front door and the conversation began. Calls got made. Things got moving, and it made Johnny feel right to be doing something productive again. Right back where he belonged.

Then the heathen had to go and ask him.

"Have you called her yet?"

"Nope. Reach me my lighter."

"Why not?"

Johnny spoke around the lit cigarette. "Cuz it's done, Boyd. It ain't ever gonna happen again."

"Yeah but it's hurtin' you."

"Not enough to make a difference where it counts." He leaned over and spun a wheel on the upside-down wheelchair, just to watch it move.

Boyd reached out and put a hand on the spinning wheel. Johnny glanced up, and there was that look again. His cousin had eyes the color of cinnamon, just about. They were kinda hard to look at when he was drilling you in the face with them. Johnny didn't bother to try.

"It's gonna count, Johnny. Give it just a little bit more time and it's going to eat you alive."

"What, exactly, Boyd, do you know about matters of the heart?" He cranked a glare up out of somewhere. "Tell me that. Explain to me why you're sleepin' with the woman who murdered your brother and you're telling me to go back to the woman I nearly_ burnt alive_." He couldn't say it loud. But he could say it these days. Gut right through it without choking on the phonemes as they left his tongue. He'd practiced.

"No you _didn't_." Boyd hissed it, and Johnny almost bit through the cigarette. "You introduced her to the chemistry. KATE made the choice. KATE dove after that bottle, and KATE…." Boyd's eyes stayed wide, but they went flat.

Kate'd spattered blood all over his face, is what she'd done. The explosion had happened soon enough she'd just been on the edge of the blast radius. Boyd remembered wishing she'd been closer. He'd never heard a sound like that in his life, and he never did after. Not even with all the horror he'd seen in Afghanistan. Nothing sounded like Kate Bellamy in shreds. Nothing.

They'd done their best, he and Johnny. They'd scraped her up and thrown her in the truck and run to the nearest hospital. She never stopped screaming, and she never stopped begging Johnny to shoot her, that if he loved her he'd shoot her and end her and she never stopped the panic. It never stopped.

"It never stopped."

"It can."

"Fuck you, Boyd.  
>0oooooooo00000000ooooo0000<p>

Ava met him at the door again that night. There was a red rose tied with a red-white-and-blue ribbon sitting at his place at the table. The beef roast she'd made had gone back in the oven, but she was still in her dress. Heels were gone though. He liked her that way, too.

"What's the occasion, baby?"

"It's Memorial Day, Boyd." The look on her face was a simple one. She wasn't honoring troops. She wasn't remembering those that had gone on before. She wasn't even having a shoutin' time over the living. She was just being Ava. And she was just making a point to make the memory.

Boyd took her and her red dress in. He kissed her unscarred left hand. They made love that night and he prayed, in all fervency and humbleness, that he and Ava would never have to look at each other the way Johnny and Kate did.


	16. Oh Tonight

A/N: The song is "Oh Tonight" by The Josh Abbott Band, featuring Kacey Musgrave. I would recommend Youtubing it before you read this. And listen to it several times. THEN come back and read. This is meant to be read with that song in the back of your head. That's how I wrote it, and, if you'll oblige a bossy writer, that's how I'd like it to be read. Thank you all so much for reading.

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"Oh tonight, we're gonna set the world on fire, and I'm gonna put aside my pride, not gonna be the one to say goodbye…..'well neither am I'….oh tonight."

Johnny sat on the porch listening to her sing without the music down at the round pen. It was late in the Kentucky eve, and she was pushing herself. Pushing the horse too. The wheelchair was down the hill in the back of his truck and he was fairly sure Kate hadn't heard him pull up. If she had, she gave no indication, and neither did the horse. He guessed they were all pushing tonight.

"And I'm gonna set aside my pride…" he heard. The sound of the song hung in the thick gold air laying in that lower pasture. And then the horse turned to face her off of the railing, stopping dead in her tracks and snorting softly. Kate spread her arms, and then turned slow. The mare seemed like she caught on the edges of the fingers on Kate's right hand, and she began to follow the turn of it, walking circles around Kate's spinning frame until they were face to face. Half a breathless second and then Johnny watched the inexplicableness happen. The mare dropped her head, walked directly between Kate's arms, and planted her broad white forehead against Kate's.

Kate was slow about dropping her arms, and even slower about how she brought her hands up over the mare's ears. There was a conversation going on down there, and in the faded gold of the middle-September evening, it hit him like a hammer. It was a peacemaking.

And he guessed, all things considered, that he was here for a peacemaking too.

Dear _Lord _she took his breath.

Kate stood with the mare for a good five minutes, just talking. The mare seemed to have things of her own to say, judging by the way her ears flickered back and forth, but she didn't move from her stance. Kate dropped her arms, ran a hand fondly down the mare's broad white nose, and was walking to the gate when she looked across and saw his truck. She only paused slightly, and then opened the gate. The mare had never left her side, and nudged her in the middle of the back. Kate turned and looked at her, then propped the gate open.

She and the mare walked up the hill in a companionable silence, but Kate stopped short of the porch steps. There leaned Johnny Crowder on the railing, almost like the way he was supposed to be. Sandy hair hung in the wind, the slit blue eyes catching and open. The shyness he carried sometimes. If you didn't know—you might have said it had never happened. It looked right.

" 'cha singin', Kate?"

She smiled as she stepped up the first board step. "I don't remember the name off the top of my head. It's by some red-dirt band I picked up out west."

"I like it," he said quietly, and then they went speechless like a couple of kids. The mare snorted and wheeled off into the pasture, and Kate laughed at her.

"Go on then. Didn't want you either."

Johnny got his voice back. "Kate…" So maybe he didn't have his voice back.

She put a hand on the railing and came up the second step and tilted her head up. Still out of range, and he cussed silently. "I guess," she remarked, "that asking you why you're here would be out of the question."

He almost choked on the nod, and she noticed his grip on the porch railing was getting tighter. "You hurtin'?"

_Just inside, honey. Just inside_. He shook his head and then realized he might have counted coup when she stepped up into his arms and helped him stand.

"Well that was easy." He snickered and Kate almost stepped back. There's this thing about wheelchairs and crutches. You get tremendous upper body strength from hauling your useless ass around under your own steam, and Johnny had long arms anyway. He didn't squeeze the hell out of her…he wanted to, but he just let her stand. She put a palm flat over his heart and put her forehead down on his chest. He prayed she wouldn't step away again.

One big Crowder hand wound itself in her hair, a pair of familiar lips met the top of her head, and Kate tilted her face up. The tears at the corners of her eyes let go of her lashes, and Johnny's eyes snapped wide. "Oh Katie don't cry. _Please _don't cry!"

She laughed then. "You know, John Crowder, that this is not going to be all roses and easiness. You know that, right?"

That admission caught him at the back of the throat, because she damn sure wasn't saying 'no.'

He started to laugh out loud and then started to tremble. The pain rattled right up his spine and right down his legs and the broken frustration on his face gave it all away. Kate didn't ask. She just eased him down on the closest porch chair and ran a hand through his hair. He opened his mouth to apologize, and she hushed him.

"You've got better things to do with that mouth tonight than apologize for stupid stuff you can't help."

Just like the first one, she started it. Caught his mouth with hers and, just like that first one, he felt like he was going to drown. He angled his jaw up and drank her in, hung his hands in her hair and pulled her down where he could reach her. She wound up with her legs hanging over the arm of the chair, draped across him.

Her left arm snaked up behind his head and caught in those appalling spikes. She smiled up, quiet. Johnny took her in, tracing carefully her ribs, the jut of her hip bones, the crook of her knee.

"It's not a pretty thing to look at these days, Johnny."

He shook his head, catching his breath and fighting off a chill. "What is it with you and thinkin' that the only way somebody can see you is the way _you _see you?"

* * *

><p>They moved inside to the couch, and then to the kitchen, and then to Kate's double bed.<p>

3AM came around. "Ain't we just a pair?" she mused as she ran a hand over John's back. Shotgun blasts tend to chew on people. He grunted and looped one long arm up over her shoulder and pulled her back down beside him.

"Honey, hush." He circled the scarred left arm with his hand and let it slide under his fingers until she took his hand in her own. "You wear'em well."

"That was a hard time."

"Yeah." He kissed the top of her shoulder with care. "I'm sor…"

She butted in. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry I shoved you away. I shoulda never….." He heard the catch in her voice and trailed a thumb down her jawline. "Wait, you were gonna say something…."

"I'm sorry I wasn't there, Kate."

The look on her face spoke what it needed to.

6AM came around and she left him sleeping while she took a shower and got ready to go down the mountain to school. She heard him scraping around halfway through her shower, and then she smelled coffee. He handed her a cup when she trailed into the kitchen in an old black cotton robe. It had a patch in the shape of a flower sewn on the right elbow.

"Gonna leave your hair wet like that?"

"Coooffffffeeeeeee," she moaned, and Johnny laughed.

Even when they were together, he'd never gotten to watch her dress. Wonder eased into his veins.

She helped him down off the porch and across her long steps to his truck. The wheelchair lay in the bed of the truck like a deflated tick, and she couldn't help but smile. "We work this out right, we can get you out of that thing for the most part, you know?"

Johnny raised a brow at the thought. "That's kinda appealing."

"I know," she said, grinning.

He kissed her like he meant it and then left her to the day.

Kate cried. She cried for all the pain they'd been packing around and how it was lifting, right then and there. She cried for all the good they might be opening up. She cried for joy, for the first time in almost twenty years.


	17. Doyle

A/N: Double barreled shotguns come in two flavors; over and under (which means that the barrels are stacked on top of each other) and side by side (which means that they are beside one another. The one you normally see in the movies is the side-by-side. Over'n'unders are kinda oddball, but I like them.

* * *

><p>Johnny rolled down his driveway in the wheelchair, brake off and letting the thing coast like he used to when he was a kid on his bike. It was going to be hard going back up the hill, but getting the mail was something that he was starting to look forward to. They were going to finish that pool game tonight. And he was gonna have a decent cue this time. He was gonna pick the thing hisself.<p>

He'd had Mark Simmons come over and run the Brush Hog over the edges of the east field, and he decided, likely against his better judgment, that it would be nice to take the long way back. It was. It felt good to be close to the woods again, listening to everything. There was a squirrel barking about twenty yards in up in an old hickory, and he flushed a couple of grouse on the way up, too. That was a nice thing to see-the last few winters hadn't been kind to them. It took him longer than he expected, but he wasn't tired after the whole affair either.

But the City of Bennett crawler setting in the middle of his yard kinda ruined the whole pastoral effect. He frowned. Doyle had parked his fat ass on the porch.

"They call that trespassing, Doyle," he sang out.

"Do they?" He smiled like a shark. "Why don't you come on up here and talk to me, Johnny?"

John wasn't quite facing the ramp up the porch so he dropped his hands off the wheels and let them hang. Doyle shifted and Johnny took note of the fact that he had a twelve gauge over'n'under setting in his lap. The little pistol he had his fingers wrapped around underneath the seat of the wheelchair was not going to make a whole heck of a lot of difference this day.

"Why don't you leave the scatter gun on the porch and come down here and talk to me like a legal officer of the law?" John gritted his teeth and sucked the air through them. His back was starting to twinge. But he had a better chance of living through this damn thing if he was setting down here where he could see the Bennett man. "Where's your brothers?"

Doyle stood up and leaned on the porch railing, shotgun easy in view. "Didn't you hear?"

"Hear what?"

"Raylan Givens shot Coover in the throat and threw him down a shaft." Doyle was casual, bitter.

Johnny couldn't say that he was surprised. Raylan was going to end up killing one of them anyhow. He was kinda surprised that it wasn't Dickey, though.

"Then where's your brother?"

"At Mama's. This here is between you and I, John. First thing you're gonna do is take your hand off that little pistol, and the next thing you're gonna do is listen to every word I say."


	18. Winona II

Kate was silent on her side of the table, waiting.

Winona looked up from her cup of coffee and straight into Kate's face. "You understand what you're dealing with here?"

"Just like you do, Wi. It's not like Raylan's not a world unto himself either."

Winona's brow rose unbidden and she reflected. "Is this going to make you happy?"

Kate shook her head, setting back over her own mug of Joe. "I don't know." Winona and she had gone to watch the new X-Men movie (not really sure why, but they did it anyway) and the conversation at the restaurant had closed the place out. They had moved down the street to Willy's and now it was one in the morning, Sunday. Three days after the re-match pool game that ended in a draw. One day after Bennett city police had ticketed Kate from bumper to bumper and Doyle Bennett had leaned his shaggy dead-eyed face inside the cab of her truck and told her that she had better be careful about her dealings, whatever those might be.

"You're treading ice, Miss Bellamy." He watched Kate's fingers curl up on the wheel and then chuckled. "Drive safe, ya hear?" He stepped back and patted the top of the cab. She had toyed with throwing up a rooster tail of gravel when she pulled out and finishing the chip-job Dick had started on the crawler's finish.

She behaved.

She made two phone calls. The first was to Raylan. She got his voice mail and told him everything, Johnny included. The second was to Johnny. She was mad now, and she bitched until he made her stop.

"Darlin'."

"WHAT?"

"Shut up." She closed her mouth and listened as he shifted in his wheels. She couldn't be quiet any longer.

"Can I talk now?"

"Nope." He snickered at the way her mouth snapped closed over the phone. "No you can't. I should have told you this the other night."

"Should have told me _what_?"

"You still aren't talking."

"Well?"

And now Winona knew too, and that left Doyle with at least three more people than he needed knowing about it making suppositions.

0oooooooo000000000ooooo0000

"What do you MEAN you don't know?"

"You're setting there telling me over that soon to be pregnant belly that you are thrilled to death every day to be at the side of a man who drives you bananas."

"I'm not pregnant!"

"Oh you are too. Eat avacados covered in chocolate in front of me again and tell me you aren't. I dare you. Does Raylan know yet?"

"No I'm not, and KATE. QUIT it."

"What?"

"You're deflecting."

"Yeah. Yeah I am. Because I don't want to talk about it."

"Well TOUGH. Who else are you going to work this out with? HUH?"

"Come ON, Winona! This isn't just as simple as 'yes I am' or 'no I'm not'!"

Winona leaned back in her own chair and stretched. Her back was starting to hurt her a little. And Kate was just being STUPID. "Okay. I'll admit that I'm pregnant with Raylan's child if you admit that you're scared." _And admit that you really don't know what you're doing either_.

It went unsaid, but Kate heard it all the same.

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Saying it out loud burnt like the whiskey in her glass as it passed between her lips.

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Winona took her hand across the table. "We need to get me and this child in bed, wouldn't you say?"


	19. Lincoln II

A/N: A SHOUT OUT: First to my youngest brother R. for assistance on all things weaponry, especially in this chapter. And for telling me when my writing's just stupid. Thank you thank you thank you a million times! Second, AndItsOuttaHere, I owe you massive thanks for your constant support. Laurie M; enjoy the boots. (grins) And go get the hat.

And to the rest of you lovely folk; my deepest thanks for reading. I am not through with this story by a long shot, but I felt that acknowledgement was in order.

* * *

><p>"Well what do you <em>think, <em>Winona? That I was gonna be all jumpin' up and down and thrilled that she's…..she's…" Raylan waved a hand. "And now Doyle's pickin' on Kate. Because he knows it's a SORE spot." The snarl came easier than she would have expected it to, and that scared Winona.

"But Raylan, nothing's happened yet…."

"Oh it will." He wheeled and pointed a finger directly at her. "You mark my word the first time somebody draws blood on either side of that mess John's gonna be in up to his neck and there's gonna be Kate as a real easy pawn. Either she'll try to help or the Bennetts'll use her to their own gain. She's just…just PERFECT." He lunged to his feet.

"Where are you going?"

"The cages." The hat went on the head and the boots went out the door. She heard him start the sedan and took a cold chill.

Okay. Okay. She could handle this. And…..and it was true. Everything he'd said was true. Winona didn't know whether to cry or just to blow it off.

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Lincoln found himself leaning over the stock of the little rifle yet again, lining it up. It fit, a good leather glove instead of the too-big thing it used to feel like. His groups were getting better. More uniform. He was still pulling to the left, but that might be a matter of the scope too. He would have to talk to Mags. In the meantime, he was prone. Ankles turned out so they were flush to the ground, left leg straight as a ramrod behind him and the right cocked up to about his middle. His cheek laid up next to the stock, his eye to the scope. They'd dialed the pressure on the trigger down to about a pound and a half. Aaaaaaaaand squeeze.

The recoil didn't rattle through him any more, but then .223s weren't known to rattle too hard anyways. He'd learned where to put the butt of the gun-that pocket between the arm and the shoulder that was mostly tissue. He didn't raise his head until his ears slowed down on the ringing. He'd forgotten earplugs, but he figured it made sense to practice this way too. It wasn't like you were going to be able to stop in the middle of a-he left that blank- and put them on. He could just see it; "Hey wait just a second, I gotta put these in before we can start shooting at each other…"

Another half hour and ten more shells. He was meticulous. And when he took the targets back down the mountain, dated, with grain of shell, yardage, and weather conditions noted on the bottom, Mags was silent for a moment. She held the newest one up to the light.

"You're still pullin' a hair to the left, Lincoln."

"I know. I kept tryin' to correct for it, but maybe it's the scope? I didn't quite want to touch it til I'd had you or Dickey take a look….."

She nodded. "Smart. It'll keep til tomorrow, though. You're gettin' better. A lot better."

"Lemme see," Doyle had injunned up, and lifted the target out of his mother's hand before she really had time to react. He looked up over the top of it at the blue haired kid standing in the front yard with his Mama's favorite rifle slung across his back. He looked sideways at his mother. "Makins' of a shooter, I believe."

"Of course he is." Mags smiled wide. "He's a natural."

Lincoln couldn't help but grin a little at that.

"Yup." Doyle grinned. "You've got school tomorrow, don't'cha, Lincoln?"

"Yeah. I do. Homework's done though."

"Sleep's necessary too, boy. Be careful heading back, ya hear?"

Lincoln got the message. He pulled the bolt back on the rifle and handed it to the chief of police. "She's empty, Doyle."

"I'll clean it for you. Keep doing what you're doing. You're on your way."

Mags hugged him. "Bye, Lincoln."

"Bye Mags. See you tomorrow."

Lincoln couldn't help but wonder what Doyle thought he, Lincoln, was on his way to, but Lincoln himself knew full well. He knew that it was stupid, too. Knew that if his grandmother had half an idea what he'd been doing after school that she'd skin him alive and nail him to the shed out back. In fact, he was fairly sure that she would have rather had him talking growin' grass with Coover than laying over the rifle stock and pouring his soul into every shot.

As he put his beat up little S-10 in gear, it shook him. How much he actually missed Coover.

0oooooooo00000000ooooo0000

School became a quiet place. Jeb was showing up for class, Amy had her pretty blonde head down working. Lincoln's own activities kept him too busy and moving too quickly for Jeb to catch him by the back of the head again. One real wet blunt and a trip to the hospital later, he'd gotten the point. For whatever reason, Amy had started talking to him. Maybe because they were the only two people out of the entire class that had turned in their report on The Sea Wolf. Maybe it was because Amy was a romantic and she remembered back in eighth grade when his hair had been dark and erratic instead of blue and gelled and he reminded her of the main character. Lincoln was more than willing to bet that was the crux of the matter, but he wasn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth either.

Everyone that paid attention knew what was going on with regards to the Bennetts. Everybody knew that Coover was dead. Everybody knew it was Raylan Givens that had shot him. Everybody cussed because Loretta wasn't around any more either. Not that Lincoln had ever bothered with her. He'd gotten curious and walked up to the barn behind Maw's house one day uninvited and was lucky that it had been Coover and not Dickey that stopped him at the door. Dick would have blown his head off, and told him so later.

So Lincoln learned the rules. He was allowed in the barn, but never when a transaction was taking place. He could read anything he wanted to off of the bookshelf in the barn, and if he kept his MOUTH shut, he could work with Coover.

And then Coover'd gotten jealous of Loretta. Loretta wasn't really anybody's business, and Lincoln had no call to pay attention to her. They weren't up at the Bennett place for the same reasons, and Mags just doted on the girl. Wasn't his business.

He blamed her, in a way.

And after…when Mags had found him setting by the door of the barn, knees tucked up under his chin, grieving… She'd simply looked at him. He'd looked right back at her. He wasn't sobbing, but the tears were coming and Lincoln Moseby did not bother to pack them away.

He and Mags had come to an agreement. She set him up with the materials he needed. And then one day, when he was walking back out to his truck, she called him in the house and handed him a rifle. He hadn't the faintest clue the science he was in for.

"Come on. I want to show you how to use this. Doyle is too much of a pistol man and I don't want you learning how to shoot from Dick. He's only good because he's got a knack. There's a better way to do it."

Thus the Mini-14 became his friend. Mags's own gun. She had used it for a long while, but she had another weapon these days, and it was the right size for Lincoln. It was semi-automatic, it could handle a large amount of rounds at a time, and it was _accurate_.


	20. Helen

A/N: Long live Helen.

(also, I am sorry that it has taken me so long-real life has become bigger. :D )

* * *

><p>Art sat back and listened, one more time, to Raylan wailing the living hell out of some unsuspecting baseball. He had heard the attendant fuss at Givens when he'd walked in without a helmet-for the fourth time that week. Art had wanted to be alone, initially. And he had been hoping, truly hoping, that Givens wouldn't be here. He didn't know why he thought that the younger Marshall might be at the cages at 3:30 in the morning.<p>

And Raylan, of course, did exactly what Art was hoping he wouldn't do.

*crack*. A pause of fifteen seconds. *crack*. A pause of fifteen seconds and the elegant arc as Raylan brought the bat back up over his shoulder and sent another one reeling out into the night.

There was only one way to deal with this. Art stepped up into Raylan's peripherary.

"Raylan."

The younger man stood bolt upright like he was in trouble.

"Art?" It came out as a cross between a squeak and a croak. The croak he had heard before. The squeak meant that Raylan was on his way to being drunk.

"Raylan, why aren't you in bed?"

"Couldn't sleep. Winona was movin' around too much." A ball popped out of the thrower and banged off of the chain-link. Raylan stepped back and caught it.

Art shook his head. "Lyin' dog. Blamin' it on your woman."

"No." Givens' face was almost childlike. "She wouldn't quit movin'. She's pregnant, Art."

Art stopped dead, and he couldn't help the smile coming over his face. "Oh! Not another Givens!"

Raylan's grin was…ecstatic and it was terrified and….there was a broken piece to it. "If it's a girl, we're going to call her Helen.

"_Oh son_," Art thought.

"Yeah! Told her if I didn't get on at Glenco I'd sell ice cream."

Art went down the list of things that had happened to Raylan in the last two weeks. He decided, in the back of his head, that he was glad Raylan was going to have a child. And then he went ahead and made it more difficult.

"So talk to me about Kate Bellamy."

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Kate had called Raylan an asshole at Aunt Helen's funeral and he Was Not Talking To Her. Winona was, on the other hand, and they mourned. Helen was a precious woman, and Kate, sitting in her kitchen, and Winona sitting at the little table in Raylan's room, drank a toast.

"To Helen."

"To Helen."

Kate knocked her glass back and Winona took a draw on her bottle of water.

"Her worth was above rubies."

"Yes it was." There was a quiet moment. Then, "Why did you call Raylan an asshole?"

"Because of the way he treated Ava. He…..he knows that girl. And he knows how she is. And he treated her like she didn't have the right to care. And I don't think its right. That's like….like telling me not to be excited for you all. We weren't the only women on this mountain Helen was good to, Winona."

Winona took another drink of her water. Heartburn was becoming a real possibility, and it concerned her. But this…this outside-ness she was seeing between her friend and her man….she wasn't sure how to process it.

"Has he come in yet?" Kate's chair scooted across the floor and Winona heard the fridge door open. It closed. There was a clink of a plate and silverware.

"No."

"It's four in the morning."

"I know. What are you eating?"

"Cold spaghetti."

Winona's stomach churned and she lurched to her feet. She could hear Kate on the phone-"Wi? Wi are you okay?"

She stood up from the commode bowl and wiped her mouth. "No. Either I'm sick or I'm pregnant."

And because it was 4AM. And because they were toasting the dead. And because she WAS pregnant, and because Helen would have TOLD Wi she was a little ill in the mind for sticking with Raylan as long as she had, Kate began to laugh. And then Winona began to laugh. And then the hiccups started, and Kate howled and the puppy joined her in the back ground and Winona couldn't get enough air between the hiccups and her own gasping hilarity.

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"Well what do you think, Johnny?"

He cradled the phone against his shoulder and reached up to flip on the kitchen light. "I think you're out your head. But I think it'll work. Tell me why we're having this talk at 5:30 in the morning?"

"Ava hasn't risen yet and I wished your opinion."

Johnny shook his head. Boyd's turn of phrase was….like unto no other. "How's Arlo doing?"

There was a pause. "He's hurting. Never thought I'd say that about someone of his….demeanor, but he is a man in serious anguish."

Johnny shook his head and started the coffee pot. "Arlo Givens is a hard case. With a long history, and an understanding of consequences." There was a pause while he poured the coffee.

"Long live Helen."

"Long live Helen."

"So I'll meet you at Campbell's at 2?"

"Yes."

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Johnny hung up the phone and poured the bitter black stuff in a thermos. He wheeled out to his truck, ratcheted his skinny body up into the cab, and slung the wheelchair into the bed. Up the mountain he went.

Kate was awake-he could see the light on in the front window when he pulled into the drive, but he was gambling that she hadn't made coffee yet.

The way up the steps was slow. There were places where the railing was literally falling apart against his hand, and he wondered what she'd done toward replacing it. Monte started yodeling before he was halfway up the stairs. The screen door crashed open and his bristlely little body shot out onto the foggy porch, ears-up-legs akimbo.

Kate trailed out behind him, eyes half open, robe cinched tight. There was a new patch, a bright green thing over the pocket. Johnny grinned up at her. "Dog's full'a himself."

She dropped a hand off the door and let it slap shut again, head cocked, quizzical. "You understand what time it is, right?"

"Yes." He grunted as he pulled himself up on the crookedest rock in the steps. Monte was sniffing his right leg, a little burr of a growl still left in his throat. It was just to keep up appearances. He knew Johnny was good for table scraps should he get them, and Monte was not one to bite the ankles of the hand that fed him.

"You understand that I don't function well at this hour."

"I come bearing gifts!" He waved the thermos at her and she was off the porch, greedy for the caffeine.

"Nuh-uh. Whatcha gimme for it?"

"A knot on your head." She stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek.

They made their way into the house.

He laid it out for her.

"If anything happens bad-and it could- you're going to have to run."

She glared at him.

"I mean it, Kate."

"So do I. This is MY house. MY side of the mountain."

"Kate, Doyle's pretty much give himself away. He'll use you he gets the chance, same way he used Coover and the same way he's usin' Dickey."

"Doyle Bennett will not harm a hair on my head as long as he thinks I am useful. And if it comes to that, he won't touch me Mags tells him not to."

"What happened to your grammar, English teacher?" He laughed, but his heart wasn't in it.

"I'm home and I'm talking about things that mean something. Shut up and drink your coffee." The bacon grease in the skillet popped and she cussed, smacking the cold water faucet on and drenching her hand.

Johnny leaned back in the kitchen chair, laced his fingers around his coffee cup. "Who's the blue haired kid up there? Do you know?"

The ramrod went slowly up Kate's spine, and gently, she turned the faucet off. Johnny set his cup on the table and leaned forward slowly on his elbows.

"Blue hair?"

"Yes. Drives a white '93 S10. Kinda dark complected. About 5'8" or so."

"Skinny."

"Yes. Devil says every time the kid's up there, there's a rifle crackin' back in the holler. Real consistent."

"And if he's not there, he's in the barn behind the house."

"How do you know?"

Kate sat down and that weary, aging look stole onto her face. "Because Coover taught him to grow." She propped her elbow on the table and cradled the side of her face. "He's in my honors class. I'll talk to him today."

"Any particular reason?"

"He's too bright to be here."

"Okay."

"Leave him alone if you can at all. He's just looking for a way to be something other than he is."

"I'll pass the word."

"Is Boyd still at the house?"

"Yeah, he should be. He was at 5:30 this morning, any how."

"So THAT'S why you came up here and upset my dog. Your cousin shook you outta bed." She smiled slow, and her face lightened a little.

"That and I still get my rocks off'a watchin' you in the morning."

Kate shook her head and smiled. The compliments felt good, even though she knew full well she had dragon breath and she looked like the Wreck of the Hesperus. She pulled the bacon out of the skillet and dropped a couple of eggs into the grease.

"Over easy?"

"Over easy."

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	21. LorettaKate

A/N: Here goes. (takes a breath)

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Loretta I

When you're little, guns don't really make a whole hill of beans difference. You learned that if you put what came out of a gun into sombBODY (but most of the time into a deer) whatever it was didn't come back. You were too little to use them for a long time. Then somebody handed you a Daisy air rifle or a .22 handy-rifle and you went a-hunting. You were observed for a long time, but if you proved that you could follow the rules, you could carry one.

That rule only went for long guns though. Loretta had never purposely carried a pistol before. Knowing what she was going to do, and knowing what she was walking in to did not make one hill of beans difference. The piece still wobbled in her hands when she brought it to bear down the hallway. And it wobbled like her heart when she made phone calls and told lies: they were nice people. She wished she didn't have to lie to'em. There were just some things that had to be done.

She hoped Lincoln Moseby wasn't any where near the Bennett House. Not that she had ever liked him, but he was far too stupid to die just because she had to set some things straight. Too much book learnin', that one.

The dirt road stretched out long in front of her. Loretta put one foot in front of the other.

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Kate I

"Raylan? Raylan, pick up your damn phone."

She was cussing into the voice mail when he answered.

"WHAT."

"Stay out of Harlan."

"Too late. I'm already here."

"Turn around. Raylan turn that car around and go back to Lexington and Winona."

"Kate…." The tone was warning.

"Raylan DAMMIT listen to me! It's about to go down!"

"What, Kate? What exactly? Or can't you tell me?"

"You know I can't." The pause was savage.

"Are you still there?" He was almost casual, and Kate wished she had known all of this sooner. Or had never known it at all.

"I know pieces. I don't WANT to know it all. But Raylan, there's….there's war brewing down here."

'Tell me somethin' I don't know. You ever heard of Loretta McCready?"

"Yes."

"Keep your eyes peeled for her at school, okay? Call me if you see her."

"Raylan don't!"

The line was dead. Kate was afraid. She didn't know whether she should go ahead and call Boyd about Lincoln or talk to the boy first. She didn't know whether to call in sick to work that day and go hold Winona's hand or get her butt down to the school house because that would be the safest place for her to be on a day like today. She…she didn't know. She didn't know what she was doing. And that frightened her more than anything in the world.


	22. Kate II

She was twitchy. She hadn't seen Lincoln, but that wasn't unusual either, so as she searched the cafeteria for that shock of blue hair, the reasoning side of her was wedging down the panic, stuffing it into the box built into the bottom of her mental basement where she kept such things locked.

Not next to Amy.

Not in his usual corner.

She approached the little cheerleader, and tapped her on the shoulder. "Amy?"

"Oh hey, Miss Bellamy." Amy smiled, half nervous.

She didn't waste air. "Where is Lincoln?"

"I don't know, Miss Bellamy."

Kate sighed. Kid couldn't lie any better than Kate herself could.

"Come with me, alright?"

Amy looked at her, nonplussed, rose, and followed her weird English Honors teacher down the hall to the first empty classroom Kate could find.

"Amy if you know where he is, you need to tell me. As in now."

"Is he in some kind of trouble?"

Kate's buttoned lips spoke what they needed to, and Amy's heart shaped face went pale under the tanning bed bronze. "Honey, 'trouble' is the least of his worries if he is where I think he is."

Amy wrapped her skinny arms around herself. "I don't know for sure, Miss Bellamy. He….we aren't dating or anything."

Kate waited.

"He said he had someplace to be, and would I please take notes for him, is all."

Kate dropped her hands into her Friday-jeans pockets and rocked back on her heels.

"Really Miss Bellamy, that's all he said!"

"That's not all he said. You two talk."

"Yeah, but we're not, like….together or anything! That'd ruin it all!"

Kate twitched hard. There wasn't going to be anything to ruin if the cheerleader didn't…..

"I don't know for sure! Somewhere on the mountain! Up around Bennett somewhere!"

Kate settled flatfoot and her eyes began to water. Oh Lord. Oh dear Lord.

"Miss Bellamy, are you okay?"

"Do you have Lincoln's cell phone number? Does it work up there?"

"Miss Bellamy, you're kinda green…."

"Give me Lincoln's cell phone number. Right now, Amy."

Amy rattled it off from memory, Kate saved it on her phone, and she walked out the door.

"Tell the principal I got sick. We aren't having class today."

Amy followed her out into the hall. "Where are you going?"

"I'm playin' hooky." Kate threw open one of the double doors and ran for the Scottsdale down the hill.


	23. Dickey II

"Hey. Hey Doyle."

"What, Dick?"

Dicky leaned around the corner, grinned like a man who knew his world was going to be forever perfect. "It's on."

Doyle raised a brow and shook his head at his brother.

"It's ON, brother!"

"Not if you don't keep your HEAD about it, you fool." Doyle's response was quiet, measured. They'd taught him enough psychology by way of the academy that he had a pretty good idea what his brother was. Not that he cared. It was just a matter of keeping all that crazy energy from getting' out from under him. Neither he nor Mags had been doing very well in that regard of late. He wished, not for the first time, that Coover was not gone. The two of them were easier to handle together. But now….Dickey Bennett had slipped the collar and was off the chain. And there wasn't a thing Doyle could do to stop it.

Granted, not that he would.

0ooooooooo00000oooo

Mags looked up from the kitchen sink at the familiar rattle of Lincoln's little S10, and her heart twinged a little bit. He sat behind the wheel after he'd shut it off for a couple of seconds, and then touched foot to the carpet of pine needles and made his way through the gate into the yard. She met him on the porch.

"Lincoln, aren't you supposed to be in class?"

He squinted up at her. "I'm sick."

"I see. Come in the house. There's no sense in us standing out here." 'In the open' went unsaid, and he followed her close. The screen door snapped shut behind him and Mags turned at the bar to look at him.

"Lincoln."

"Yes ma'am?"

"You understand the gravity here, don't you?"

"Yes ma'am."

She took a long slow breath, calculated him from head to foot, and then walked back across the aging green carpet to her room to unlock the gun-safe. She came out with two boxes of shells and the rifle.

"I do not know how this day will be, Lincoln. I do not know." She offered him the rifle and he cradled it. "But should….in the event…that things get ugly…. I'd rather you in the hay loft."

Lincoln nodded. "I'm not much good anywhere else anyhow, Mags. Thank you for the consideration though."

"Anything you need?"

"Another box of shells and a bottle of water?"

She obliged.

The nest Lincoln put together in the hay loft was not quite what he would have wanted. It was back from the big window that overlooked Mag's little stretch of valley bottom. There were still a few old haybales laying up there-he wasn't sure why Coover'd left them there, but he used them. A boon; the ladder up to the loft was propped up with three sandbags, and Lincoln forbore safety climbing back down in favor of a solid rest that he KNEW would stop a bullet.

In the end, he had a clean shot at everything but the ten yards between the house and the shade tree at the gate. He wasn't doing his job if anything got that close to the house anyhow.

Lincoln hunted down that stillness in his bones and waited.

0ooooooo00000000ooooo0000

The crippled form crept up on the side of the house and slipped through a half open window. Devil was on the front porch, the semi-automatic rifle rattling harshly. Dick smiled to himself. She was standing in the kitchen, set as low as she could be on her heels, the shotgun in hand. Her pretty hair caught the light from the kitchen window behind her and framed her bright, shocked eyes.

"Hello Ava."

He pulled the trigger and sealed it all. She fell back against the counter with a strangled grunt. He'd blown her chest open. He ran for the truck.

This was war.


	24. Raylan II

A/N: I know, I know! It's short. But there is more to come.

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Boyd's face, when Raylan looked up from the ground where he was untangling his ankles, was unlike he'd ever seen it before. He'd seen Boyd mad. He'd seen Boyd grieving, calculating, in a fury. He'd seen him _burnt to the ground_. This was different.

"Dickey, I'd sleep like a baby….." he said. And Dick started to beg.

It pained him more than a little when he did what he had to do. Boyd's hands were trembling as he watched Raylan pick that piece of slime up off of the ground and stuff him in the back of the Lincoln. He watched Boyd in the rearview as he pulled out. The look in those cinnamon eyes made him understand why the man carried two purple hearts and a medal of honor. It made him understand what Boyd was capable of.

Dickey prattled on, drooled in gratitude like the dog he was. Raylan gritted his teeth.

Later when he looked back on it, he didn't remember the events as much as he did the words that were said.

_"Raylan, you can go down there, but I won't guarantee that I'll be here when you get back."_

_"Dickey, I'd sleep like a baby…."_

_"You pull that trigger, your life is gon' change."_

_"Get to see my boys again….get to go into the mystery…"_

He passed out shortly after, so when he came to in the ER with Gutterson on one side of the stretcher and Winona on the other, it sorta surprised him.

"Thought you was leavin'?"

Winona dropped his hand at that, and Tim snorted. Gutterson had a black eye, and Raylan couldn't really understand where it had come from.

0oooooooo00000000ooooo0000


	25. Gutterson II

Lincoln was frozen: he'd watched Doyle hit the ground, heard Dickey screaming, had seen Loretta go inside the house and then a detective (detective?) follow. There were cops EVERYWHERE. What was worse, he couldn't place the shooter that had taken Doyle. That had been a precise piece of work-part of him realized this even in his horror- and now he was in the worst trouble he had ever been in.

If he moved, he risked getting caught. If he stayed put, he risked getting found in a sniper's nest on the scene of a Federal level crime. He had risen to his feet and was starting to thread through the drying racks when he heard the barn door shriek on its hinges. The hair on the back of his neck stood up.

0ooooooooo00000000ooooo0000

Short handedness and the situation put Gutterson leaving the barn alone.

"I don't like this," Rachel had remarked under her breath as he reached around her for his Kevlar.

"What? The ghost of Coover Bennett gonna get us?" He offered his rifle and she took it grimly, handing him two loaded clips. Up the hill, Art to his 3'o'clock and a state trooper he didn't know to his 7.

They prowled. Tim strained his ears; there are times when you can hear a heartbeat from a hundred miles away. You just have to listen. The trooper stuck his head up in the hayloft and dropped back down. "Nothing up there but dryin' racks."

A silent '_would you?_' from Art passed over the head of the state boy and Tim nodded infinitesimally. Gutterson pointedly said he had to take a leak, and Art swept the trooper out the door. Then he went to work.

The dust on the floor boards around the ladder had been disturbed; he'd seen that just as soon as they'd walked in. He'd heard the floorboards creak too, and he knew damn well that the trooper wasn't paying near enough attention.

Up the ladder he went. Standing on the top rung of the ladder, his head and shoulders just barely cleared the trap door opening. The force of the blow he took to the head was enough to leave Gutterson near breathless anyway. Never mind the fall down the ladder. Never mind the pair of boots that connected with his stomach as whoever was in the loft burned out of the barn in a puff of blue smoke. The clatter brought Art back at a run.

0oooooooo000000000ooooo0000

Lincoln took to the woods and headed south across the face of Green Mountain. The ghost of Coover Bennett rode the dust of his heels.


	26. Boyd III

A/N: Just for clarification, a M*A*S*H surgeon is a military surgeon who served in a mobile hospital. They treat things like bullet wounds close to the heart and blown off limbs. I recommend the show, and I also recommend the movie. Nowadays they're called CSH (say it cash) surgeons. The US stopped having M*A*S*H units after Vietnam.

0oooooooo000000000ooooo0000

Boyd paced while the young doctor worked. His steps (clipped, military) faltered every time Ava gasped. He almost thought he could handle it better if she were screaming. She moaned once, and then there was a silence. Boyd paused, one knee lifted slightly in readiness.

The kid doctor came out of the room wiping his hands. "She needs a hospital, Mr. Crowder."

"We can't go to a hospital."

"She has lost almost too much blood. And I'm not a MASH surgeon."

"Is she stable?"

"As stable as a person who's lost that much blood can be….."

"Then you go find me a damn MASH surgeon. As many people as Kentucky puts in the military there has to be one in these hollers somewhere and you have the state medical registry at your disposal."

"Mr. Crowder there's not a whole lot anybody can do for your wife right now." The doctor saw a couple of heads come up from around the kitchen table and there was a deathly pause.

Boyd had the kid up by the collar and on the wall before he realized he had moved. "DON'T…" And then he stepped back slightly, eased him down. "Don't tell me what you think will get you off of the hook, doctor. I have been in combat and I have served as a medic. Now she's AB negative. If I were that blood type, I'd let ya have it, but I ain't. You have the resources, Doctor. I strongly recommend you usin' 'em."

The young doctor took a breath. He had not realized, when Arlo Givens had rousted him off of his porch that afternoon, that he would be in so far over his head. "Alright. Alright. I know enough people in this county with that blood type, and I know where your fuckin' Army surgeon is too. You'll have to give me a while and I have to make a few phone calls." He had not lived this long, and had not fought this hard to get through med school to die in the last half of his residency.

First do no harm, right?

Boyd Crowder scared the piss out of him.

0oooooooo000000000ooooo0000

Lincoln fell hard across a grape vine, skidded across the forest floor, rolled to his feet, and kept running. He'd pushed so hard his face was red and his ears were pounding. His lungs kept trying to lock up on him. His hands and knees were bloody from the fall before this, and he knew, crash by stumble, that they would find him. They would come from the Bennett's place, follow the mess he had made, and find him at the end of it all. He was done. He was a federal fugitive.

He'd never get to shoot again.

Finally, his knee cracked out from underneath him and he began to roll down the hill. A tree caught him about halfway down the hogback, and he saw black stars for he didn't know how long while he lay there against the swag of its trunk. It took him a minute to realize that he was on the hill above a house. He lay still, observing.

It did not occur to him that the sun was at his back. And more importantly, that it was at his hair. So when Devil slipped out onto the back porch and looked up the face of the ridge, there hung Lincoln Moseby like a bright blue flame. Lincoln could _see _how pale the man was, even from a hundred yards up the hillside.

Devil stepped back two steps, looked through the screen door, said something.

Quick steps; Devil, Boyd Crowder and a third walked out on the porch and Lincoln realized that if he ran right NOW, it would be about thirty seconds too late. Crowder stepped out into the yard, tilted his spiked head back and spoke in a loud voice.

"You best come down here, young man." Crowder's voice was loud, harsh. Something Lincoln couldn't put a finger to. "You best do it right now."


	27. Kate III

_Damn these hard times, damn the coal mines, damn all these good dreams gone cold. And while I'm at it, damn this crooked road._

The brakes on the Scottsdale locked up and Kate was out of the truck before the thing actually came to a stop. She ran. The back of the house was fifty yards from the Scottsdale and it didn't really occur to her that she might get shot between there and Boyd.

Never mind that she wasn't sure he was at the back of the house.

Never mind that she had no way of knowing where Lincoln was.

That was where the gunfire was coming from.

She rounded the corner in time to see a long arm come down level with a blue head on the ground and a pistol lining up.

The world held dead still while she screamed.

_Down that long black highway there's a deep dark hole, _

_Down that long black highway there's things you'll never know. _

0oooooooo000000000ooooo0000

0oooooooo000000000ooooo0000

Boyd looked up at the sound, hand hung in the grip too tight to be stable, eyes gone too far. A torch white flash in blue-jeans coming around the corner of the house and Devil's arm swung up.

_And they were on and flyin' down the road,_

_Flyin down the road tryin' to loosen the load, _

_Headed for disaster again. _

And then it snapped in Lincoln's head. The boy lunged off his knees, threw himself at his teacher and put her on the ground in the space of a second and a half. Devil turned loose half a clip in the same amount of time. Boyd connected with him from the side and the air went a'cloud.

People hit the dirt. Kate caught sight of the sky (or was it Lincoln's hair) and Devil was on his knees with a hand clamped on her arm and Boyd's eyes were backing off from polished copper to the cinnamon they were supposed to be and men were at the ready. There were gun barrels everywhere. Kate observed, in the back of her head, that being on the ground was not any safer a place in this situation than it would be if she were standing.

Her ears quit roaring a few seconds into the exercise. She sat up, glaring at Devil. Then she glared up at Boyd.

"I don't guess I should have waited til now to tell you." Her knotted left hand came up and clamped tight on top of the oozing rip. Blood seeped from her fingers as she rocked up from her knees to her feet. Devil braced her one side, his eyes speaking reams, and Lincoln stood trembling on the other.

Boyd placed his handgun back in the belt, careful. Precise. "Tell me what, Katie?" His brow furrowed, mouth twisted back in an awfully close imitation of Raylan's twist.

"You talk to Johnny?"

"No."

Kate sighed, her pixie face blunt. "Reckon you were going to kill this one?" She cocked an eye toward her student, eyes cold.

For the second time since Kate had come home, Boyd found himself speechless in her company. In the truth of the matter, at that point in time, he had intended to. He had no intention of doing such a thing _now_. He let his hands drop open to his sides.

Kate huffed. "Well don't. Okay? He's Lisa Moseby's."

Boyd rocked back on his heels and regarded the boy, his breath half-hung in his chest. "I can see the resemblance." He looked back at Kate.

She shrugged. "Acts like it too."

Lincoln looked from one to the other and his heavy brow dropped.

0oooooooo000000000ooooo0000

0oooooooo000000000ooooo0000

He knew when he climbed up into Mag's barn loft that he wasn't going to ever be the same again after today. But the next night, after setting in Ava Crowder's blood stained kitchen talking with….he still couldn't wrap his head around calling him Uncle…..Boyd til nigh three in the morning, Lincoln reflected. He chewed long and hard on the crookedness of the road that had got him here, and the uniqueness of his position.

0oooooooo000000000ooooo0000

A/N: The songs, in order of appearance, are Crooked Road and Long Black Highway, by Chris Knight. The third is one of mine, so you won't be finding it anywhere. (quiet smile)


	28. Life is Long

Winona sat in a chair by her ex-husband's hospital bed, rocking back and forth. Every once in a blue moon Raylan would stir, and she'd twitch in surprise. Seeing the man this still brought chills to her spine and before the night was over, she'd crawled up in the hospital bed with him, tugging the cheap white blanket up around both of their shoulders and trying not to shift around too much. She did not sleep. The heart monitor blipped into the dawn.

Raylan stirred, cracked an eye. She caught her breath.

He dropped an arm around her, whispered into her hair. "I'm glad you didn't leave."

Wi tucked her face beneath his chin and breathed her man in. Every precious breath of him. There was a quirk in her stomach and even though she knew, in the back of her mind, that the little glob of hers and Raylan's cells wasn't big enough to move around yet, she wondered if it was the baby.

0oooooooo000000000ooooo0000

Kate sat on the tailgate of the Scottsdale, shaking her head at the still smoking ruins of her boyfriend's house. Johnny was being brave and leaning up against the gate on his arms, feet spraddled. The wheelchair was half-collapsed about twenty feet away. Monte had wedged his stout little body between them and was stretched out on his belly, panting. The sun was shining, almost summer hot in the crisp air.

"Weeeeeelllll," he drawled, and then looked over at Kate.

"Don't look at me! I wasn't the one that set charges in there."

They were quiet for a moment. Then:

"I guess I could move into Bo's old place."

Kate snorted. "I'm sure. The place leaks like a sieve and some of those rats have been in there long enough that they've MUTATED."

"Yeah. The pool table's not level either. Well, there's that upstairs room at the bar…"

Kate looked at the wheelchair, looked at John, and then looked away. She was biting her cheeks.

"It's not any worse than the steps going up to your house. And besides. The railing's better."

She raised a brow, leaned back against the wheel well. "I'm replacing that," she remarked primly.

"When?"

"Oh…" she took her time. "Probably before I redo the linoleum in the kitchen."

"So not before Christmas."

She looked hurt. "Well, maybe it'll be before Christmas…"

"Huh." He paused. "I don't guess the room up above the bar is furnished, anyways."

Neither of them said much. The bandage on her arm was a little stiff. The sun was bright, shining, almost summer hot in the crisp Harlan air. Monte squeak-yawned in the sun.

"I need to find you a horse," Kate said.

Johnny looked appalled.

0oooooooo000000000ooooo0000

Devil's hands were shaking, and he could swear they were still drenched in Ava. Oh God oh GOD. What had he done? He looked down at the freckled skin, white as the driven snow underneath. He wanted to cut'em off.

The hands he should have cut off were wrapped around a bottle that was pressed to a mouth over the broadest set of jaws in Kentucky. Sealed up tighter than a drum. He should have killed himself. He should have handed Boyd his Mini 14 and let the man blow his brains all over the side of the hill.

Moonshine, usually, is somewhere around 120 proof. It has a nose like paint thinner and a finish like acetone. It will kill you, given the correct opportunity. Apparently, it didn't think Devil had afforded it such a one because he'd been at it for days and was still breathing.

He could still hear Boyd: broken, terrified for his woman 'baby why didn't you stay in the cellar?'

_"Sugar, Devil?" _

The wind came up with the thunderstorm that night and tore three sheets of tin off the roof. Broke a window too.

0oooooooo000000000ooooo0000

Art was in the waiting room, shoulders hunched. He dragged a hand across his mouth and looked up when his daughter came back into the room. She had those little spots of color on her cheekbones that she got when she had been up longer than she needed to be.

"Do you want some coffee, Daddy?"

"Thank you, baby." He sat up a little straighter, took the Styrofoam cup from her hand and sucked the scalding liquid down his throat. He made a face. "This tastes like something Gutterson would make."

His daughter laughed. "They said she'd be coming to in just a little bit. Do you want to come on up and be there? Or do you want to wait until she's kinda here?"

Art gave his child a look. "Now what do you think?"

Faylene was infinitely pale.

"Hey beautiful," he croaked.

"Shut yourself up, Art Mullen." She smiled and took his hand on top of the hospital sheet. He laid his head down next to her knee and looked up at his wife, her gray-green eyes narrowed and laughing tiredly. They stayed still like that for a long time, and then 'Lene sighed. "Are you ready for what's coming?"

Art shook his head, his jaw coming forward as the lump in his throat swelled. "No."

She pulled him up where she could brush the tears back. "Me neither, honey."

Art laid his head on his wife's fragile shoulder. He had done a lot of thing he wasn't ready for. He had become a husband, a father, a Marshall, a man of belief and conviction. A man of faith. That day with Boyd Crowder in his office came to mind, and the fury he had felt with that leather bound book in his hand.

"Don't be scared," Faylene said suddenly. "I'm not."

He sat up and looked at her.

"We have a long while yet before this chapter comes to a close, me lover."

He shook his head at her, caught his breath, and straightened up.

"Systemic cancer, huh?" he asked.

"Ain't got nothin' on me." Faylene raised her chin.

0oooooooo000000000ooooo0000

_Life is long._

_Helen Givens_


	29. The Author's Note

The Author's Note:

_Thanks_

My dear friends, much thanks are in order. First to AndItsOuttaHere for her consistence and honest opinions! I PROMISE I will write more! We can't have you going into withdrawal!

Second, to Laurie M.-girl, I know you still aren't finished reading the fic, but our discussions have fed my creativity and I thoroughly appreciate it. I applaud your purchase of the boots, once again, and I continue to posit that at some point in time you should purchase a Western hat. :D

Third, to my brother R and my daddy. When I need to know details or simply have random questions, I can drop them on both of you out of the blue and I get a thought out opinion. Thank you both.

Fourth, to all my lurking readers. Guys, I write. I am not the best in the world, but when I look at my statistics on here and realize that there are people coming back to read what's come out of my imagination and onto the keyboard, I'm honored. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to run around in my imagination. Hope you enjoyed the trip. (quiet smile)

_Music _

I listened to a lot of Chris Knight while I was writing this, and pulled different tunes from his entire discography. He is a Kentucky boy out of a teensy little mining town who writes and sings from what he knows. He has this rugged kind of voice that wraps around your spine and chills you to the bone. You aren't going to find him on iTunes, but the songs you are looking for are as follows: Broken Plow, My Old Cars, Down the River, Crooked Road, North Dakota, Lynnville Train, Enough Rope, Long Black Road. The list could go on.

Then you've got the Josh Abbott Band. The only thing I really listened to of theirs was a tune called "Oh Tonight," but it holds a pivotal point with regards to the story.

The only other song FEATURED in here is by Jamey Johnson. It's called "That Lonesome Song" and is off of the album by the same name. He's another one that eats at my soul.

I didn't create a soundtrack, but if you punch in these names and songs into Pandora DOT com, you'll get most of these folks.

Once again, y'all, thank you so much for your time. There's more to come!


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